Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies 156549217X, 9781565492172

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Maps
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Acknowledgments
Contributors
1. Theoretical Approaches to Brokerage and Translation in Development • David Mosse and David Lewis
2. Aid Policies and Recipient Strategies in Niger: Why Donors and Recipients Should Not Be Compartmentalized into Separate “Worlds of Knowledge” • Benedetta Rossi
3. Resources, Ideologies, and Nationalism: The Politics of Development in Malaysia • Amity A. Doolittle
4. Governing Land, Translating Rights: The Rural Land Plan in Benin • Pierre-Yves Le Meur
5. Translating, Interpreting, and Practicing Civil Society in Vietnam: A Tale of Calculated Misunderstandings • Oscar Salemink
6. Brokering Fair Trade: Relations between Coffee Cooperatives and Alternative Trade Organizations—A View from Costa Rica • Peter Luetchford
7. Ethnographic Research in a Non-governmental Organization: Revealing Strategic Translations through an Embedded Tale • Wiebe Nauta
8. Inside Out: Rationalizing Practices and Representations in Agricultural Development Projects • Bina Desai
9. “They Can’t Mix Like We Can”: Bracketing Differences and the Professionalization of NGOs in Nepal • Celayne Heaton Shrestha
10. Rethinking the Mechanics of the “Anti-Politics Machine” • Tim Bending and Sergio Rosendo
Index

Citation preview

Development

Brokers and Translators

Development

and

The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies

Edited by David Lewis and David Mosse

Published in the United States of America in 2006 by Kumarian Press A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Kumarian Press A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB

© 2006 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved First published in 2006 by Kumarian Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Development brokers and translators : the ethnography of aid and agencies / edited by David Lewis and David Mosse. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13:978-1156549-217-2 (alk. paper) 1. Applied anthropology—Research. 2. Applied anthropology—Methodology. 3. Rural development projects. I. Lewis, David, 1960 June 2– II. Mosse, David. GN397.5.D47 2006 301.072—dc22 2006005866

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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CONTENTS Maps Abbreviations and Acronyms Acknowledgments Contributors

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1. Theoretical Approaches to Brokerage and Translation in Development David Mosse and David Lewis 2. Aid Policies and Recipient Strategies in Niger: Why Donors and Recipients Should Not Be Compartmentalized into Separate “Worlds of Knowledge” Benedetta Rossi

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3. Resources, Ideologies, and Nationalism: The Politics of Development in Malaysia Amity A. Doolittle

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4. Governing Land, Translating Rights: The Rural Land Plan in Benin Pierre-Yves Le Meur

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5. Translating, Interpreting, and Practicing Civil Society in Vietnam: A Tale of Calculated Misunderstandings Oscar Salemink

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CONTENTS

6. Brokering Fair Trade: Relations between Coffee Cooperatives and Alternative Trade Organizations—A View from Costa Rica Peter Luetchford 7. Ethnographic Research in a Non-governmental Organization: Revealing Strategic Translations through an Embedded Tale Wiebe Nauta 8. Inside Out: Rationalizing Practices and Representations in Agricultural Development Projects Bina Desai 9. “They Can’t Mix Like We Can”: Bracketing Differences and the Professionalization of NGOs in Nepal Celayne Heaton Shrestha

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10. Rethinking the Mechanics of the “Anti-Politics Machine” Tim Bending and Sergio Rosendo

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Index

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MAPS Map 4.1 Villages covered by the PFR in Benin. Map 7.1 The Eastern Cape during apartheid.

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ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS Chapters AAO AFD ANC ANT APAD

ARA AS CAE CBO CELCOR CFO CGFED CILSS

CPA CRES CS CSERGE DLA

Assistant Agricultural Officer French Development Agency African National Congress Actor Network Theory Association euro-Africaine pour l’anthropologie du changement sociale et du développement Albany Resettlement Association, or Albany Rural Assocation Agricultural Supervisor Agro-Economic Consultancy Community-Based Organization Cellule de coordination Co-financing Organization Center for Gender, Family, and Environment in Development Comité Inter-états de Lutte contre la Séchéresse dans le Sahel or Comité permanent Inter Etats de Lutte Contre la Sécheresse au Sahel (Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel) Communal Property Association Center for National Resources and Environmental Studies Civil Society Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment Department of Land Affairs

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8 4 7 1

1 7 8 6 9 4 5 5

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ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

Chapters ESRC EU FAO FO FSR GAD GAT GDP GDW GEAR GICO GONGO GPU GRA GTZ ICAR IDA ICO IMF INGO JKKK

Kemas MAE MAEP

Economic and Social Research Council European Union Food and Agriculture Organization Field Office Farming Systems Research Gender and Developmennt Gender Awareness Training Gross Domestic Product Gerakan Desa Wawasan (Village Movement Toward Vision) Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Gruppo Internazionale di Consulenza Government-Organized Nongovernmental Organization General Project Unit Gasela Residents Association Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit Indian Centre for Agricultural Research International Development Association International Coffee Agreement International Monetary Fund International Nongovernmental Organization Jawatankuasa Kemajuan dan Keselamatan Kampung (Authority for Village Development and Protection) Kemajuan Masyarakat (Community Progress [or Development]) Minestero degli Affari Esteri Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fishery

10 5 2 9 8 2 9 5 3 7 2 5 5 7 4 8 4 6 5 5

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Chapters MRA MRD

Monti Rural Association 7 Movement for the Restoration of Democracy 9 NEP New Economic Plan 3 NFE Non-Formal Education 9 NGO Nongovernmental Organization 1, 4, 5 NVDA Nonviolent Direct Action 10 ODA Official Development Assistance 5 OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 2 OFR On-Farm Research 8 PACCOM People’s Aid Coordinating Committee 5 PBS Parti Bersatu Sabah (United Sabah Party) 3 PDR/ADM Projet de Développement Rural/Ader Doutchi Majiya 2 PEDM Programme on Environmental Decision Making 10 PFR Plan Foncier Rural 1, 4 PGRN Natural Resource Management Project 4 PGTRN Natural Resource Management Project (T for Terrior) 4 PHC/CBR Primary Health Care/ Community-Based Rehabilitation 5 PLANAFLORO Rondônia Natural Resources Management Project 10 POLONOROESTE Northeast Brazil Integrated Development Program 10 PPC Provincial People’s Committee 5 PRA Participatory Rural Appraisal 1, 4, 5 RDP Reconstruction and Development Program 7 RRA Rapid Rural Appraisal 4 SCO Savings and Credit Organisation 9 SSK Sociology of Scientific Knowledge 8

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ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

Chapters SPP UMNO UNCOD UNDP UNEP UNSO VUFO WB WFP WID ZRA

Surplus People Project 7 United Malaysia National Organization 3 United Nations Conference on Desertification 2 United Nations Development Programme 1, 4, 5 United Nations Environment Program 2 United Nations Special Sahel Office 2 Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations 5 World Bank 5 World Food Program 2 Women in Development 5 Zweledinga Residents Association 7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The chapters of this book first made their appearance as contributions to a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London between 26 and 28 September 2003 titled “Order and Disjuncture: The Organization of Aid and Development.” This was jointly organized by SOAS and the London School of Economics (LSE) and by the two editors, under the auspices of EIDOS, the European Inter-university Development Opportunities Study Group. Founded in 1985, EIDOS brings together British, Dutch, and German anthropologists actively engaged in the study of development. We would like to thank EIDOS co-members who participated in the organization of this event, especially Rüdiger Korff, Philip Quarles van Ufford, Monique Nuijten, Oscar Salemink, and Heiko Schrader. This volume is, to all intents and purposes, the latest addition to the EIDOS series of writings on development and anthropology. The volume editors are grateful to all the participants in the conference, both paper presenters and discussants, for making it a highly stimulating and intellectually productive event (for details, see Benedetta Rossi, “Order and Disjuncture: Theoretical Shifts in the Anthropology of Aid and Development,” Current Anthropology 54(4), August–September 2004, pp. 556–560), and to those who offered behind-the-scenes and “on the day” administrative support, as well as website and CD preparation. We wish to extend special thanks to Benedetta Rossi, Charlotte Wilcox, Kazu Ahmed, Becky, Mora, Duncan Franklin, Robert Whiteing, and David Martin. Related products of this conference have appeared under our joint editorship as The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development (Pluto Press, 2005) and in a special issue of the journal Oxford Development Studies (vol. 34, no.1, March 2006)

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with the title “Encountering Order and Disjuncture: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on the Organisation of Development.” We would like to thank the contributors to this volume who have reworked their papers to build on parallel and complementary perspectives and who put up with our stop-start editorial process with enormous patience. We wish to thank Susan Yates for her efficient and cheerful project management, and Jim Lance, Krishna Sondhi, and the rest of the team at Kumarian Press for their warm and enthusiastic support of this project.

David Lewis and David Mosse February 2006

CONTRIBUTORS Tim Bending is a writer living in Freiburg, Germany. Bina Desai is policy and research officer at Christian Aid, London (UK). Amity Doolittle is an associate research scientist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and program director of the Tropical Resources Institute. Pierre-Yves Le Meur is an anthropologist at Groupe de Recherche et d’Echanges Technologiques (GRET), Paris. David Lewis is a reader in social policy at the London School of Economics. Peter Luetchford is Leach/Royal Anthropological Institute research fellow at the University of Sussex. David Mosse is reader in social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Wiebe Nauta is a lecturer in the anthropology of development at Maastricht University. Sergio Rosendo is a researcher in the program for Environmental Decision Making at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, University of East Anglia. Benedetta Rossi is an ESRC fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Oscar Salemink is professor in social and cultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Celayne Heaton Shrestha is research fellow at Kingston University.

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ONE THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO BROKERAGE AND TRANSLATION IN DEVELOPMENT

David Mosse David Lewis A change is under way in the relationship between anthropology and development, marking the end of a long period of mutual marginalization. This book brings together anthropologists of development who are part of this change. They show why the world of international development needs to embrace contemporary anthropological theory and methods, and at the same time why development must be central to both empirical and theoretical concerns of anthropology.1 The starting point for this book is the premise that ethnographic research can provide policymakers and aid managers with valuable reflective insights into the operations and effectiveness of international development as a complex set of local, national, and cross-cultural social interactions; and it is no longer possible to isolate interactions in the realm of development from those related to state apparatus, civil society, or wider national or international political, economic, and administrative practices. In other words, an anthropology of development is inextricably an anthropology of contemporary Africa, Latin America, and Asia. This perspective is shared in important recent work by French anthropologists, published under the title Courtiers en Développement (Brokers in Development) (Bierschenk et al. 2000), for whom the study of development draws attention to actor practices and concepts, strategies, and contextual constraints that illuminate broader national and international political economy. Development, of course, involves a great number of interactions between actors of different statuses, with varying resources and dissimilar goals, “for whom development constitutes a resource, a profession, a market, a stake or a strategy” (Olivier de 1

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Sardan 2004: 11). The neoliberal trend to denationalize and decentralize aid serves to diversify further sources of power and influence, via a proliferation of organizations and intermediary networks (Bierschenk et al. 2000). The multiplicity of interactions in development gives this field of anthropology a “privileged empirical pathway” into social reality, since it forces attention to the social processes and negotiations of meaning and identity in heterogeneous social arenas in a way that challenges narrow culturalist approaches (Olivier de Sardan 2005).2 For Bierschenk and others (2000), this social reality is best illuminated through attention to the roles of “brokers,” who assume a growing importance and capture significant resources in the mediated cultures of development. Brokers and Translators seeks to build on this empirical work, rooted in the interactionalist tradition of British anthropology, but also to bring new insights into the social production of meaning in development from the sociology of science, using Bruno Latour’s notion of “translation,” which is explored in detail later. By expanding beyond the study of brokers at the interfaces of the development apparatus to include “translation” in the making of development worlds, this book seeks to broaden Bierschenk and others’ original scope of analysis. It does this by making a contribution to an anthropology of “the global” that is concerned with new forms of transnational connection between “people, information and ideas,” within what Burawoy and colleagues (2000: 34) term the “stretching of organizations” beyond the nation-state, a realm that has never been more important in international development and “global governance” (see Mosse 2005b).

Anthropological engagements with development: instrumental, populist, and deconstructivist The contributors to this book seek to draw development into mainstream anthropology by taking a nonnormative, empirical, and ethnographic approach that stands apart from the instrumental and ideological positions that have dominated the interface between anthropology and development for well over a decade. These can be grouped under three broad headings. First, anthropologists have engaged with development instrumentally. They have been enrolled (or have enrolled themselves) as “applied” researchers, consultants, managers, or bureaucrats. These different roles have been accompanied by varied personal and institutional

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motivations for direct involvement in development—such as a commitment to social progress or institutional reform, an interest in action research perspectives, or even a response to the resource pressures of academic life. Of course, the mode of “application” has changed. Anthropologists recruited for their specialist regional expertise later found themselves the source of generalizable knowledge about “social variables” or working as bureaucratic entrepreneurs, consenting to the instrumentalization of their interest in social relations and power through concepts such as “social capital” or “empowerment,” to be used within large development bureaucracies such as the World Bank (Mosse 2004b).3 Such anthropologists have often been compelled to adopt the instrumental “means-ends” rationality that characterizes these policy worlds, paying their way with knowledge products that are normative/prescriptive, predictive, and usable in enhancing development effectiveness. Against this tradition, the chapters of this volume reaffirm the value of a noninstrumental, nonnormative research perspective. They refuse to frame the relationship between development intentions and outcomes, policy and practice in simple instrumental terms (as “better implementation”)4 and instead pay equal attention to the social processes of policy and the informal relationships and real-life situations of development workers. A second mode of anthropological engagement with development has been ideological and populist rather than instrumental. This includes various participatory, “bottom-up” approaches to development or “alternative development,” which celebrate “indigenous” knowledge and “local” capabilities while denigrating global science and top-down technology transfer. This perspective advocates participative forms of research and learning while rejecting “extractive” ones. By no means confined to anthropologists, and most strongly associated with the work of Robert Chambers (1997, Chambers et al. 1989), this approach was initially more typical of NGO workers and activists outside the development mainstream. However, by the late 1990s “alternative” vocabularies (if not practices) were also found in agencies such as the World Bank, where they became reframed into instrumental forms. Olivier de Sardan (2005) characterizes the naïve simplification of some of these alternative approaches—for example, participatory rural appraisal (PRA)—as ideological populism, the unqualified valuation of indigenous knowledge and community tradition. His point is that this has to be distinguished from methodological populism, which is the essentially anthropological stance of taking a local point of view to discover the rationale of actions. The empirical studies in this volume seek

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to recover the important distinction between ideological and methodological populism, while still questioning the valuation attached to participative versus extractive types of research. This allows exploration of actor strategies, social relations, and the contradictions that are concealed by participatory methods. A third anthropological orientation to development has been critical and deconstructive. Informed primarily by the work of Foucault, it analyzes development as “discourse”—a system of knowledge, practices, technologies, and power relationships that orders and limits description and action within its field. Development is seen as a historically specific discourse of power of the West over the “developing” world. This approach is illustrated at its most basic by Escobar (1995), who charted the rise of development discourse and practices as instruments for Western capitalist countries to maintain domination over what became constructed as the “Third World.” It emerges in a more carefully ethnographic form in Ferguson (1994), who analyzed a project case in Lesotho to show the ways in which development discourse has produced depoliticized knowledge about, and offered technical solutions to, development problems.5 The intellectual fashion to which these writers contributed did not argue for “alternative development” but rather advocated “alternatives to development.” These deconstructive approaches are no less ideological than populist ones. Indeed, Olivier de Sardan (2005) describes this form of poststructuralist analysis as ideological deconstructivism while pointing out that by privileging the local and denigrating scientific and “world ordering knowledge” (Hobart 1993) they are also dangerously infused with populism. Ideological deconstructivism offers a “diabolic image of the development world [that] pays little attention to incoherences, uncertainties and contradictions” or describes every diversion or sidetracking of development as a popular resistance arising from the presumed autonomy of the subaltern (2004: 5). Such a view overlooks the collaboration and complicity (or duplicity) of marginal actors/institutions in development, such as the “consumer practices” (de Certeau 1984) of “beneficiaries” who understand and manipulate the rhetorics, rules, and rewards of aid delivery; or the “recipient strategies” of locally powerful state actors who entrench their authority behind subservience to neoliberal donor paradigms (see Rossi, Chapter 2, this volume). Moreover, deconstructivist approaches adopting a Foucauldian approach effectively demote agency and view development effects not as political strategy, but as occurring “behind the backs or against the wills of even the most powerful actors” (Ferguson 1994: 18). The problem

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is that this “merely replaces the instrumental rationality of policy with the anonymous automaticity of the machine” (Mosse 2004a: 644). In other words, ideological deconstructivism, no less than instrumental policy prescription, fails to examine the relationship between the rhetoric and “mobilizing simplifications of policy and politics” and the world as understood and experienced within the lives of development actors. Both approaches “divert attention away from the complexity of policy as institutional practice, from the social life of projects, organizations and professionals and the diversity of interests behind policy models and the perspective of actors themselves” (Mosse 2004a: 644). The researchers in this book do not abandon these deconstructivist perspectives, but endeavor to make them methodological rather than ideological; this is a means to analyze the interaction of ideas and relationships in development arenas (Olivier de Sardan 2004; Apthorpe and Gasper 1996; Mosse 2005a).

The contemporary context To contextualize the contributions to this volume, we have characterized anthropological involvement with development as instrumental, populist, or deconstructivist. Running alongside are other distinctions, such as between the applied and the pure, the normative and the descriptive, optimists and pessimists, and the ideological and the methodological. These are useful, but not categorical, distinctions that need to be set in the context of recent intellectual trends in international development itself.6 First, more reflexive and critical currents are already emerging among policy and populist thinkers (for example, Wallace and Kaplan 2003). However, these may still be constrained by institutional knowledge systems that emphasize the universal over the contextual (King and McGrath 2004: 107) and “constantly organize attention away from the contingencies of practice and the plurality of perspectives (and which therefore marginalize anthropology as a critical and ethnographic discipline)” (Mosse 2004b: 80). Second, advocates of participatory alternatives are no longer confined to the grass roots, but promote participation at the macro level. They do this, for example, in the form of civic engagement and citizen consultation for national planning, through secondary stakeholder participation and partnership as a mode of donor-recipient relations, or by contributing to networks of global civic activism on human

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rights or justice in which “local” actors “jump scale” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 996, citing John Rugge). Third, critical analysis of development has moved on from its earlier, intensely value-laden deconstruction of policy narratives. It now directs closer attention to development’s routines, practices, and subjectivities and is increasingly informed by Foucault’s later work on the state and his concept of “governmentality.” This work combines the ideas of “governing” and “modes of thought” to express the idea that “it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them” and extends the meaning of government to include both governing others and governing the self (Lemke 2000: 2–3). The idea of governmentality links “technologies of the self” with “technologies of domination” and makes possible analysis of the ways in which, between the extremes of coercion and consensus, it is also possible to conceptualize power as acting more subtly through the production of subjectivity within individuals. Although skeptical about the way in which such an analysis may close off “the very possibility of people being more or less free from others’ power to live as their own nature and judgment dictate,” Lukes (2005: 107) nevertheless acknowledges the important empirical implications of asking “just how and to what extent the governed are rendered governable” (98). In Chapter 2 Rossi reminds us how participatory approaches in development have also been understood in these terms (for example, Cooke and Kothari 2001). Development policy, then, can function to regulate social life not by overt control or repression, but by a productive form of power that enrolls and empowers supporters, and that operates in multiple and unpredictable ways to build its “orders.”7 A fourth development is that there is today more direct engagement and contestation between policymakers (instrumental or populist) and their deconstructivist critics, who no longer occupy separate universes. Consider, for example, a recent exchange in Third World Quarterly. Crawford (2003) provides a “deconstructive” account of the limitations and inequalities of the Partnership for Governance Reform initiative that was launched in Indonesia in 2000 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. This program has the stated aims of improving the coordination of donors and lenders in Indonesia and providing a higher level of Indonesian government control over the process of “governance reform.” Drawing on Lukes’s (2005) “radical” view (in his three-dimensional view of power), Crawford argues that partnership is “permeated by relations of power” (2003: 145) that not only generate an observable

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clash of interests between different actors as the outcome of control exercised by direct agency, but also involve the exertion of power through the control of agenda setting and decisions about what gets discussed and what does not. The author goes on to show, through a detailed study of donor documents, that the partnership remained “externally shaped, driven and influenced by international agencies” (155) and closed to anyone who did not represent “local support for a governance reform program that provides the institutional framework for economic liberalization and the opening up of the Indonesian economy to market interests” (156). Issues such as government and military reform, which Crawford argues were important priorities for many segments of the population and were widely documented as such, were simply excluded from discussion in the partnership agenda. The result, argues Crawford, is a “myth of partnership” that perpetuates the “ongoing exercise of power” (156). Crawford’s critical article quickly provoked a rejoinder by Mallarangeng and Van Tuijl (2004), who provide an alternative account of the same process from their positions within Indonesia’s National Democratic Unity Party and the Partnership for Governance Reform, respectively. With equal passion, these authors take issue with what they term Crawford’s “selective inclusion of information,” which, they argue, obscures the fact that “power relationships and processes of opinion making and decision making are increasingly located in complex and transnational settings.” The article accuses Crawford of portraying Indonesians as overly passive in their relations with international donors, ignoring evidence that “makes a mockery of his case study,” and as being unable “to see beyond what he wants to find” (932). In particular, their account brings a greater level of historical detail and depth, and points to illuminating counter-examples of power being exercised within the partnership by Indonesian members of the board, as in the rejection of the “good governance” label in favor of a farther-reaching and locally rooted “governance reform” concept. Detailed information from meeting minutes is invoked to refute many of the generalized claims made in the first account. To situate the Partnership in a one-dimensional NorthSouth, donor-recipient dichotomy is too narrow. It assumes a single antithesis between the international and the Indonesian side, as well as homogeneity within each side, respectively, which is over simplistic. (927)

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Thus, in countering Crawford’s allegation that popular representation was heavily restricted within the partnership structures in Indonesia, Mallarangeng and Van Tuijl draw attention to the social reality that people “wear multiple hats and have multiple institutional affiliations,” (924) which undermines any simple institutional classification of government, business, and civil society. The relevance of this argument to our discussion is not that one or the other of these accounts is in the end more “correct,” but that the dispute highlights in stark terms how different frames of reference are used to analyze the “same” events, reflecting the different positions of the actors involved in the events themselves and in their documentation. To follow Latour (1996), there is not just a relativity of points of view on a given object (a question of perspective); rather, objects appear or disappear depending upon the interpretations given them by people of different standing. “The war of interpretations” continues; perspectives are “not brought to bear on anything stable, since no perspective has been able to stabilize the state of things to its own profit” (79). In other words, “actors create both their society and their sociology, their language and their metalanguage. . . . There are as many theories of action as there are actors” (167). This challenges anthropologists to reflect on their own positionality and the fields of power within which their knowledge production becomes (or fails to become) authoritative (see also Mosse 2005a, 2005c). “Does there exist, after all,” Latour asks, “a theory in which all these actors and all their theories can be summed up, one that would enable the sociologist-king to speak with some authority?” (1996: 167). At the same time, the need for critical analytical description of the processes of international development has never been of more practical importance. Current development policy continues to be characterized by a striking incongruence between, on the one hand, what Cornwall and Brock (forthcoming: 1) refer to as a ubiquitous “seductive mix” of development “buzzwords” such as “poverty reduction,” “empowerment,” “partnership,” “participation,” and “civil society,” which combine a “no-nonsense pragmatism with almost unimpeachable moral authority,” and, on the other, a striking lack of progress in relation to a wide range of development indicators—whether the more specific Millennium Development Goals or the more diffuse, but no less developmentally important, goals such as securing peace in the Middle East. Within the dominant paradigm of neoliberalism, official narratives of development institutions are concerned with attempts to “square the circle” so that poverty reduction can be combined with

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securing institutional buy-in to market-based patterns of liberal capitalism and governance structures. Anthropology has a significant contribution to make to the intellectual challenge of better conceptualizing the relationship between international development policy models—an increasingly virtual world of sophisticated global ambitions—and the practices, events, and material outcomes they are expected to generate or legitimize. At the same time, it allows us to trace links to the broader political economy of international inequality that frames the world of development agencies and institutions themselves.

Framing development ethnography theoretically Actor-oriented aproaches What theoretical models can inform such enquiry? The authors in this volume draw on a range of approaches from English and French literatures in support of their analyses of the social processes of development. From the Manchester school of anthropology comes the actor-oriented approach, which in the words of Norman Long, one of its best-known advocates, seeks to build an ethnographic understanding of the “social life” of development projects—from conception to realization—as well as the responses and lived experiences of the variously located and affected social actors. (2001: 14–15) This approach emphasizes the ways in which development meanings are produced and negotiated in practice and how development processes and interactions have different significance for the various actors involved (Long and Long 1992; Arce and Long 2000). For example, it facilitates understanding of the ways government bureaucracies and development organizations operate and the differences between their formal objectives and goals and those that emerge through the practices and strategies pursued by actors at different organizational levels (Lewis 1998; Lewis et al. 2003). It considers the relation of policy and practice not as an instrumental or scripted translation of ideas into reality, but as a messy free-for-all in which processes are often uncontrollable and results uncertain:

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The concept of intervention thus needs deconstructing so that it is seen for what it is—an ongoing, socially constructed and negotiated process, not simply the execution of an already-specified plan of action with expected outcomes. (Long and Long, 1992: 35) The actor-oriented approach also opens up the study of intermediary actors or brokers operating at the “interfaces” of different world-views and knowledge systems, and reveals their importance in negotiating roles, relationships, and representations. By managing both strong and weak ties (Granovetter 1973) in these negotiations, social actors “steer or muddle their ways through difficult scenarios, turning ‘bad’ into ‘less bad’ circumstances” (Long 2001: 14). Long and others’ field-based method of rich description and case-focused dynamic analysis is hard to disagree with, but is not without its critics. Olivier de Sardan suggests that the approach has itself become narrow and repetitive in character, its primary concepts unchanged since the mid-1980s: This very abstract system of interpretation gradually evolves into self-sufficiency, into a closed circuit, while its empirical studies sometimes give the impression of being tailored to illustrate or justify its “guiding concepts” instead of producing innovative local or regional interpretations, or opening up new perspectives. (2005: 12) The key concept of “interface” (between different social or life worlds, knowledge, and power) itself involves an unhelpful compartmentalization of identities and may be an increasingly inadequate metaphor for the various types of exchanges, strategic adaptations, or translations contained within development interventions (Rossi and Heaton, Chapters 2 and 9, this volume). Similarly, “negotiation” is a poor descriptor of phenomena that may range from “strategic stances” to “unconscious dispositions” behind the compliance or compromise that either reproduces or erases social and institutional boundaries—for instance, between extensionists and farmers, donors and recipients, or policymakers and project planners (see Rossi and Heaton, Chapters 2 and 9, this volume). Actor-oriented approaches have also been criticized for a tendency to neglect broader issues of power and structure. As Gledhill (1994: 134) puts it, “actor-orientated approaches [of this kind] may help us break

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out of the structuralist-functionalist strait-jacket, but they also imprison us in a new one” if they make actor strategies the center of their analysis at the expense of broader causal factors. Since Long and others were originally motivated by a desire to overcome the limitations of what they saw as monolithic claims of structural dependency and generalized commoditization theory (Harriss 2000), they were sometimes accused of playing down structural issues of wider politics and economics. To be fair, as Olivier de Sardan points out, actor-focused and interactionalist approaches (barring those schools of ethno-methodology that insist on restricting analysis to the situations of interaction) do not imply reductionist assumptions and draw attention to contextual constraints, “pinpointing conjunctural and structural phenomena” (2005: 11). Moreover, the issue for Long (2001: 13) was not to separate actor and structure but rather to confront the challenge of explaining “differential responses to similar structural circumstances.” Indeed, much of this type of work has led to convincing attempts at locating transactionalist approaches within broader political and economic analysis, as Harriss (2000) shows in his discussion of Long and van der Ploeg’s (1994) analysis of the “multiple and variable forms” of interactions and outcomes between Friesland farmers and their institutional and economic environment, which “brings together the significance of commoditization, and the agency of actors in strategizing and negotiating responses, in a field of power which involves the state and agribusinesses” (5).

Brokerage and brokers in development The actor-oriented approach makes a useful entry point to the issue of brokerage, which is a central theme of this collection. Brokerage is, of course, a long-standing theme in political anthropology, in which structural-functionalist models have been challenged by work—such as that of the Manchester school—highlighting the ways in which social actors operate as active agents building social, political, and economic roles rather than simply following normative scripts (Bierschenk et al. 2002). In this approach—exemplified by the work of Bailey in India and Boissevain in the Mediterranean—brokerage is viewed as an outcome of a weak state unable to impose its rationality on local areas, and enlisting patron-client relationships to reduce the unpredictability of the state’s efforts at intervention and control. At the same time, Eric Wolf’s (1956) work on the role of brokerage between community and state in Mexico presented the broker as a powerful yet

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marginal and vulnerable figure located between fault lines and connection points within complex systems and relationships. By “maintaining the tensions which provide the dynamic of their actions” such brokers are put in the position of facing “in two directions at once,” and their study can “provide unusual insight into the functions of a complex system through a study of its dysfunctions” (66). It is within the Francophone Africanist literature that brokers in the development context have received most careful attention. Bierschenk and others (2000, 2002) examine the role of development brokers at both national and international levels in Africa as an important, and often understudied, mode of political action within the context of international aid. Focusing on a specific group of social actors who specialize in the acquisition, control, and redistribution of development “revenue,” they mark out a new ethnography of the social spaces that exist between aid funders and recipients: They are supposed to represent the local populations, express its [sic] “needs” to the structures in charge of aid and to [the] external financiers. In fact, far from being passive operators of logic[s] of dependence, development brokers are the key actors in the irresistible hunt for projects carried out in and around African villages. (2002: 4, emphasis in original) In their ethnography, Bierschenk and colleagues (2002) go beyond the heavily normative presentation of such people that is common in development discourses, where they are depicted either as “‘parasites’ preying on mismanaged aid” or more positively “as emanations of ‘civil society’ confronting adversity,” to reconstruct the “social and historical reality” of the phenomenon itself. They locate brokerage within the fragmented politics of the postcolonial state, where power is exercised both through formal bureaucratic logics and through a diverse range of “supra-local” associations and networks, in which there is a flourishing of intermediate actors and organizations.8 These studies are part of a French theoretical tradition in the ethnography of development—much of it forged through the work of APAD (Association euro-Africaine pour l’anthropologie du changement sociale et du développement, or the Euro-African Association for the Anthropology of Social Change and Development)—that shared the influence of the Manchester school, although it was also linked to Marxist structuralism

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and populism (Olivier de Sardan 2005). Such approaches do not imply a closed theoretical system and are characterized by “a common distrust of ideologies (be they scientific or developmentalist).” Rather, this is an “empirical quest” to “apprehend[ing] development facts in all their— remarkable—complexity” and a shared methodological position “which allows [the authors concerned] to produce new interpretations ‘close to the field’” (Bierschenk et al. 2002: 13), promising “a corpus of concrete analyses on the embeddedness of various social logics.” Moreover, collaborative and comparative work suggests links to more macro-level analysis, while interpretive innovation ensures the relevance of the anthropology of development as a serious contribution to regional ethnography, for instance, that of local power or the modern state (Bierschenk et al. 2002: 13).

Translation and networks Despite its empirical open-endedness, studies of development brokers have tended to impose a particular kind of social analysis in which brokers are seen as intermediaries between development institutions and peasant society. Brokers are, as it were, by-products of the situation, entrepreneurial agents of the “developmentalist configuration” (Bierschenk et al. 2002: 13), having key institutional positions, albeit unscripted, informal, personalized, and highly unstable ones. Although they may not recognize them as such, brokers are seen as having particular competencies, strategies, and “careers.” Bruno Latour’s work challenges the sociological certainty implied here and suggests that we should be far less confident about the a priori existence of social and institutional realms. All actors (and not just sociologists) produce interpretations, and powerful actors offer scripts into which others can be recruited for a period. In this sense their interpretations are performative: “They prove themselves by transforming the world in conformity with their perspective on the world” (1996: 194–195). Our concern becomes, then, not how actors operate and strategize within existing arrangements of development (or between its institutions and society), but how development projects—always unforeseeable— become real through the work of generating and translating interests, creating context by tying in supporters and so sustaining interpretations (Latour 1996; Mosse 2005a). The concept of “translation” here refers to mutual enrollment and the interlocking of interests that produces project realities.

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Moreover, where an interactionalist approach emphasizes the brokering of an almost endless multiplicity of actor perspectives, strategies, and arenas, the metaphor of “translation” examines the production and protection of unified fields of development. Indeed, it is the appearance of congruence between problems and interventions, the coherence of policy logic, and the authority of expertise (Mitchell 2002) that is really surprising and requires explanation—without recourse to earlier forms of “discursive determinism” (Moore 2000: 657). The ethnographic task is thus to show how, despite fragmentation and dissent, heterogeneous actors in development are constantly engaged in creating order through political acts of composition (Latour 2000). As one of us has put it, It involves examining the way in which heterogeneous entities—people, ideas, interests, events and objects (seeds, engineered structures, pumps, vehicles, computers, fax machines or databases)—are tied together by translation of one kind or another into the material and conceptual order of a successful project (Latour 2000). So, the coherence attributed to a successful development project is never a priori; never a matter of design or of policy. (Mosse 2005a: 9) It is in this way that “actor network theory” (ANT) has enriched earlier actor-oriented approaches. ANT is an analytical tradition closely associated with Latour’s work in the field of science studies that is concerned with the ways in which scientists are continually engaged in the construction and management of the social contexts of which they form a part, through enrolling and juxtaposing a diverse range of elements— such as laboratory equipment, colleagues, scientific papers, and research grants—in ways that link the natural and the social worlds. Within these networks of practice, both human actors and nonhuman actants (such as artifacts and devices) are related through a series of negotiations and defined in terms of the ways in which they act and are acted upon. Actors assume identities in relation to their strategies of interaction, and political representations inform the negotiations that take place between these actors. The overall system can be stabilized only when actors are able to reconstruct the network of interactions through the creation of coherent representations, which they do through a process of “translation” that permits the negotiation of common meanings and definitions and the mutual enrollment and cooptation into individual and collective objectives and activities.

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Latour (1999: 311) argues that rigid oppositions such as that between context and content or the social and natural worlds are challenged by “chains of translation” that “refer to the work through which actors modify, displace, and translate their various and contradictory interests.” Likewise, there is no reason to privilege particular “interfaces” or broker roles (men with networks), since the work of producing and protecting representations occurs through diffused agency in networks, and through chains of translation. In Latour’s thinking, the term “blackboxing” refers to the tendency for scientific and technical work—and, by extension, development work—to be made invisible by its own success; for example, when a machine runs efficiently, there is an increasing focus only on “its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity.” When Latour (1999: 304) states, “paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become,” one is reminded of the disjuncture between the increasingly grandiose vision of international development and the relatively low levels of transparency and clarity about how development institutions work. The strength of this approach is that it makes possible a deeper analysis of the way in which actors operate to stabilize interpretations and produce meaning, social networks, and development success at every level—within donor policymaking circles, consultancy teams, and project staff as well as among the consumers of development. In Chapter 8 Desai explains and illustrates the relevance of this sociology of science to development in the context of agricultural extension in India. These nonnormative ethnographies of aid and development agencies return to questions of agency beyond “development as concealed power” in order to “throw light on the complexity of practice” (Kothari and Minogue 2002: 13). But does this amount to anything more than a new set of clichés—socially embedded, negotiated, complex, situated practices, systems of representation? What can the ethnography of development explain? What does it tell us that we need to know? First, ethnography can explore the multiple rationalities of development. Since it is not constrained to privilege authorized (instrumental) interpretations, it can throw light on areas of development practice that are hidden or silenced by policy, but that are critical to understanding how events actually unfold in particular settings and why interventions do or do not work. Second, it can bring fresh insights into the social processes of policy, offering a “methodological deconstructionism” that draws attention to the nature of policy language (or discourse) that reveals how particular policy ideas—governance, participation, civil society, fair trade, or gender equality—work to enroll supporters (officials

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and beneficiaries, researchers and subjects),9 forge political connections, and create common realities from heterogeneous networks. Furthermore, it shows how policy models become transformed as those who do buy into them (such as government officials, aid staff, field-workers, or community members) make them part of their own social and political trajectories. It makes clear that “policy models and program designs have to be transformed in practice. They have to be translated into the different logic of the intentions, goals, and ambitions of the many people and institutions they bring together” and who lend them solidity and the appearance of consensus (Mosse 2005a: 232).10 The authors in this volume show that the social processes of development also ensure that all actors—perhaps through strategic representations—invariably defer to dominant or official narratives of agency and history that work to reinstate policy ambitions and to conceal divergent and contradictory logics of practice. Third, these processes give prominence to the unscripted interinstitutional, intercultural brokerage roles that exist at many different levels. The work presented here seeks to take forward the approach of Bierschenk and co-workers (2002), who show that brokerage is required by the co-existence of different rationalities, interests, and meanings, so as to produce order, legitimacy, and “success” and to maintain fund flows. These are “skilled brokers (managers, consultants, fieldworkers, community leaders . . .) who read the meaning of a project into the different institutional languages of its stakeholder supporters, constantly creating interest and making real” (Mosse 2005a: 9) against the ever-present threat of fragmentation. Brokers deal in people and information not only for profit in the narrow sense of immediate reward, but also more broadly in the maintenance of coherent representations of social realities and in the shaping of their own social identities. The contributors here speak of a range of competencies required by brokers— organizational, linguistic, presentational, and relational—as part of a career trajectory that may either lead to “a step upwards leading ultimately to social promotion” or, in the unstable marginal worlds in which these brokers operate, to “a loss of confidence” and status (Bierschenk et al. 2002: 24). Fourth, these ethnographies examine a complex set of largely concealed personal, community, and institutional “system goals” that coexist as “hidden transcripts” with official goals, or “public transcripts” (Scott 1990). They throw light on the ways narratives and procedures serve ends “which [revolve] around the preservation of rules, administrative order and relationships of patronage” (Mosse 2005a: 17) and that

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help construct and maintain social and professional identities and structures of power and authority. Ethnography that focuses on the lifeworlds of staff (such as the chapters by Heaton and Desai in this volume) brings out the performative aspect of development action and knowledge, and shows the work needed to keep official representations and professional (as well as beneficiary) identities in place while maintaining a degree of ambiguity and room for maneuvering in the world of development.11

Structure of the book In Chapter 2 Benedetta Rossi sets the ethnographic agenda for the volume as a whole by characterizing the relationship between development policy and local interests not as an “interface” between opposed rationalities operating at different scales, but as a series of shifting positions available to actors depending on circumstances. Providing an ethnographic account of an aid-funded rural development project in Niger, she examines the ways in which development as a neoliberal system of governance is “consumed” and transformed by people acting locally, and turned toward their ends. Through the cumulative effects of many small acts of reinterpretation, rather than via overt acts of resistance, the dominant orders of governance are exploited from below. Chapter 3 and 4 further explore the modes and instruments of governance involved in development. Amity Doolittle (Chapter 3) frames national development interventions in Malaysia as a mechanism for the extension of state power. Going beyond Ferguson’s (1994) Lesotho study, she suggests that the effects of development programs are not unintended, but are a means to increase federal power at the state level and to underscore the political, economic, and cultural dominance of the Malay-Muslim minority in Sabah. However, Doolittle’s ethnographic account also shows the fragility of the legitimacy of development interventions. In the theater of development and citizenship, local officials need to create the illusion of villager support and to demonstrate social transformations to senior federal visitors. As brokers, these officials need “dramatic competence” (Bierschenk et al. 2000) as well as a capacity to translate interests into their interpretations. In Chapter 4, Pierre-Yves Le Meur pursues a similar intellectual agenda in his analysis of the “rural land plan” (Plan Foncier Rural, or PFR) in Benin, which is intended as a neutral and participatory mechanism to give legal status

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to customary land rights. However, like Rossi in analyzing “sensitization” in Niger, Le Meur shows how the PFR is best viewed as a tool for producing and ordering a certain kind of reality within a natural resource management project that involves selective appropriation, strategic interpretation, and the “translation” (in Latour’s and Callon’s sense) of customary land use and rights. The chapter provides a clear ethnographic exploration of the crafting of governable spaces (Rose 1999) by acting on social reality, creating authorized knowledge, and erasing complexity and diversity through a chain of “translations” linked to different actors and interests. The next three chapters examine the contradictions and disjunctures that are created and manipulated by modes of upward accountability within development’s policy regimes. In Chapter 5 Oscar Salemink explores contradictions associated with the “good governance” agenda of development donors and the resultant attempt to translate international development discourse on “civil society” into a Vietnamese context. His ethnography shows that while the Vietnamese state was willing to accept the presence and activities of international NGOs as a benign proxy for political civil society in the country, these NGOs were willing to fund Vietnamese government–owned NGOs—in the absence of recognizable liberal civil society organizations—as a convenient form of substitute NGO in their efforts to “build” civil society. Decentering the instrumental view, Salemink shows that international “civil society” objectives simply could not be translated linguistically, conceptually, or operationally in the context of Vietnam, but at the same time NGOs were required to portray their work in terms of objectives mandated by their constituencies in Holland. This is a pertinent illustration of a development program that proved “successful” while contradicting its core principles, illustrating the contingent and contentious ways in which external governance relations are increasingly extended through structures of civil society. In Chapter 6 Peter Luetchford explores a similar bridging of different normative worlds, this time in the context of the markets surrounding ideas and practices of “fair trade.” The core dilemma is as follows: Coffee producers in Costa Rica benefit from access to fair trade markets that protect against drastic price fluctuations, but to do so they have to translate commercial and business success into the language of donorship and the gift, and willingly be the object of patronage. Luetchford shows how skilled brokerage is required to mediate the hiatus between the “commercial and the ethical” in fair trade. Costa Rican producers deny the implied ideology of the gift with themselves as beneficiaries, but are

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still required to translate commercial success into marginality, poverty, and need. The disjuncture in meanings generates tensions and threatens relationships. Returning to NGOs and civil society, in Chapter 7 Wiebe Nauta shows how disjunctures are produced as a South African NGO develops its program in order to forge political connections and secure legitimacy in a changing context. This process involves “strategic translations” between community needs, government programs, and the NGO’s goals. The chapter shows how disjunctures between policy goals and practices are not simply the result of externally imposed donor agendas, but emerge out of the strategic actions and agency of local NGO actors. The following two chapters direct detailed attention to the agency of the frontline workers who mediate these disjunctures, showing, at another level, how the work of securing legitimacy and winning beneficiaries and supporters is not a matter of reducing the gap between official policy and actual practice. In Chapter 8, Bina Desai explores the theme of identity maintenance among frontline workers in state agencies and NGOs, focusing on the function and social effects of knowledge. Specifically, she examines the significance of scientific knowledge in the construction of identity among agricultural extension workers in India. But the chapter also has a broader theoretical purpose. It applies to agricultural extension (the transfer of knowledge) the concern of science with the relationship between the performative dimension of scientific knowledge in agriculture and the representation of scientific knowledge as a discrete entity. Desai shows how closely entwined are the social processes of making scientific knowledge and those of reproducing identity, authority, and hierarchy within an extension service and between experts and farmers. The insight of Celayne Heaton Shrestha’s ethnography of NGO workers in Nepal (Chapter 9) is that development work involves the strategic production of disjunctures that are not so much bridged by brokers, as maintained and reproduced. Heaton reaches this conclusion from looking at the way in which development discourse and organizations provide a setting for identity formation. She is concerned with the lifeworlds of frontline workers and with the performative aspect of development work, and focuses on impression management and the fronts that have to be maintained. She writes about the professional identities of development workers called to “embody bikas” (development) as people without history, gender, ethnicity, or class, and she shows how these aspects of identity are “bracketed” in the everyday

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world of Nepali NGO workers. Through a nuanced analytical account, Heaton highlights a core dilemma for field-workers trying to build relationships across the boundaries of organization and community, who are subject to constant appraisal by managers and villagers. To be progressive, they have to transcend social difference; but to be moral, they have to respect difference. Heaton argues that “bracketing”—the assertion that “difference makes no difference”—is a way of dealing with this dilemma. Chapter 10 returns to the perspective and reinterpretations of development by the “beneficiaries.” Timothy Bending and Sergio Rosendo focus on the perspective and agency of local populations affected by development. The authors show how regimes of development are in fact perpetuated by the people who are the “objects” of these regimes but who are far from passive victims of development. Drawing comparatively on material from Malaysia and Brazil, Bending and Rosendo show how people articulate what are clearly external agendas in order to build alliances and win supporters (as well as to get jobs and access to resources; see Rossi, Chapter 2). The Penan in Malaysia can thus be seen as co-producers of environmentalism, who strategically deploy—and find themselves compelled to speak in terms of—the more potent “noble savage”–style objectifications of foreigners. Bending and Rosendo draw on Homi Bhabha’s ideas to conclude that “colonization is not the unidirectional exercise of power by the colonizer but is something that the colonized often co-produces.” Correspondingly, the expressions of social movements are best read, in this analysis, critically as “strategic responses to certain discursive, geo-political situations.”

Conclusion The actor-oriented perspectives of the anthropology of brokerage, combined with recent work on policy and projects inspired by science studies and Latour’s use of the idea of translation, form a fruitful analytical perspective through which to examine the work of development agencies ethnographically. Such a perspective highlights the textures and tensions within micro-level processes. A new anthropology of brokerage can be identified from within the workings of development and projects where the brokers described by many of the authors here are concerned as much with building and maintaining coherent meanings and representations as with the more traditional “functional” roles highlighted in previous anthropological accounts.

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More generally, a key advantage of the ethnographic approach is that it invites us to question the fallible claims to order and logic made more widely in academic and policy circles in relation to globalization and development. As Edelman and Haugerud (2005) point out, there is much that anthropological work can reveal through further empirical scrutiny of the widespread variations in the forms and consequences of neoliberal policies and the limitations of both positive and negative stereotypes found in much unnuanced globalization theory. Ethnography refuses, as Burawoy (1998) suggests, to concede a global logic to capitalist change, and it questions the coherence of the representations and world-ordering narratives produced by the public discourses of development organizations and policymakers on which much development debate depends (see Mitchell 2002). While ethnography returns again and again to the interactions and interpretations of actors showing how they produce policy and its effects, the realm of development offers new challenges to anthropology as a discipline concerned with the always uncertain relationship between thought and action in human society.

Notes 1. We are very grateful to Benedetta Rossi for commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2. The study of mission perhaps provides parallel opportunities for intercultural research. 3. See Mosse (1998) and Gardner and Lewis (1996) for a brief overview of the changing nature of applied anthropology. More specifically, Bebbington and others (2005) bring together recent perspectives on research at the World Bank. 4. The prevailing view of “development as practice” has been critiqued by Thomas (2000), who argues that it impoverishes both the theory and practice of development to restrict definitions in this way. 5. Others working in this frame include Roe (1991, 1994), Hobart (1993), Crush (1995), and Sachs (1992), whose title Grillo used to label this “the Development Dictionary perspective” (1997: 20). 6. Edelman and Haugerud (2005: 2) write, “Mostly gone are musty oppositions between ‘applied’ and ‘mainstream’ or ‘academic’ anthropology. The topic of development is no less theory-worthy or theory-laden than any other in anthropology.”

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7. See Anders (2005), Ferguson and Gupta (2002), Gould (2005), Li (2002), Mosse (2005b), Shore and Wright (1997), and Watts (2003) on the idea of “governmentality” in relation to development. 8. These include village associations, cooperatives, religious groups, migrant organizations, and, at the individual level, local public service holders, regional intellectuals, customary leaders, and unemployed college graduates. All are drawn to the building of livelihoods within the realm of decentralized aid. 9. Of course, these are not neat dichotomies. Crewe and Harrison (1998: 181) dissolve the language of the “developers” and the “developed” throughout their ethnographic account of development agencies and show how, for example, “Colombo-based NGO staff are dominant in some contexts (in relation to potters) [and] subordinated in others (when dealing with donor representatives).” 10. For example, although the “sustainable livelihoods framework” has been used by agencies as a means of analyzing the livelihoods of beneficiaries, including the consideration of social and symbolic asset accumulation alongside financial and material capitals, it has not to our knowledge been used to explore those of field-workers, NGO managers, and project staff. 11. For example, the personal dimensions of development work are frequently rendered invisible. Crewe and Harrison (1998:184–185) write, “The prevalence of marriage, sexual relationships, and friendship between ‘developers’ and ‘recipients’ is widely acknowledged (at least informally) amongst practitioners, but they rarely appear in development studies literature.”

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Mosse, D. 2005c. Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities. Malinowski Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, 2 June. Forthcoming in J. Royal Anthropological Institute. Olivier de Sardan, J.P. 2004. Anthropology and development: Understanding contemporary social change. London: Zed Books. Roe, M.E. 1991. Development narratives, or making the best of blueprint development. World Development 19(4):287–300. Roe, M.E. 1994. Narrative policy analysis: Theory and practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, N. 1999. Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sachs, W., ed. 1992. The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. London: Zed Books. Scott, J.C. 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shore, S., and S. Wright, eds. 1997. Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power. London and New York: Routledge. Thomas, A. 2000. Development as practice in a liberal capitalist world. Journal of International Development 12(6):773–788. Wallace, T., and A. Kaplan. 2003. The taking of the horizon: Lessons from Action Aid’s experience of changes in development practice. Action Aid Working Paper No. 4 (August). Kampala, Uganda. Watts, M. 2003. Development and governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(1):6–34. Wolf, E. 1956/1971. Aspects of group relations in a complex society: Mexico. In Peasants and peasant societies, edited by T. Shanin. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, pp. 50–68.

TWO AID POLICIES AND RECIPIENT STRATEGIES IN NIGER

Why Donors and Recipients Should Not Be Compartmentalized into Separate “Worlds of Knowledge”

Benedetta Rossi

Introduction Donors and recipients have been described as social constituencies belonging to different “lifeworlds”1 and separated by epistemological and social “interfaces.” The notion of interface, which has become mainstream in anthropological studies of development in the last fifteen years, emphasizes discrepancies “of social interest, cultural interpretation, knowledge and power” that “may involve the interplay of ‘worlds of knowledge’ . . . such as those of the farmer, extensionist and agricultural scientist” (Long 1989: 221–222, quoted in Long 2001: 89). This chapter explores the nature of the relation between aid rationales and recipient strategies in the Keita development project in Niger,2 and argues that it is not helpful to compartmentalize “aid givers” and “aid recipients” as if they were social groups governed by different, or even incompatible, logics. The chapter looks at the interaction between development workers and recipients, exploring the notion of “sensitization” (sensibilisation in French and kai ya waye in Hausa3). Sensitization is a prominent institution in the practice of aid throughout French-speaking West Africa. It consists of a set of practices aimed at making project beneficiaries willing to accept change and encouraging them to express their problems in conformity with 27

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prevailing development discourses (see Bierschenk 1988; Tidjani-Alou 2000). Grassroots development workers are primarily responsible for what they refer to as “sensitizing the peasant” (sensibiliser le paysan). At first sight, sensitization appears to take place at the interface between aid givers and aid recipients. Through it, grassroots development workers turn villagers into “beneficiaries.” In turn, “sensitized” aid recipients learn to reproduce development rationalities. Yet they do so in an instrumental manner. They manipulate this system so as to unfold idiosyncratic trajectories that, at a local level, allow them to improve their conditions. Aid “beneficiaries” relate to the development apparatus like de Certeau’s consumers relate to the forces of production (see de Certeau 1984: xiii). “Consumers” of development manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities. Their “styles of action intervene in a field which regulates them at a first level . . . but they introduce into it a way of turning it into their advantage that obeys other rules and constitutes something like a second level interwoven into the first” (de Certeau 1984: 30). Men and women living in the Keita Project intervention area constantly attempt to make project activities suit their own needs. Their “ways of using” the project presuppose a realistic awareness of what they can achieve by virtue of the recipient status ascribed to them by development rationales. It is not only aid recipients who manipulate development discourses instrumentally. Development workers also think reflexively about their roles and may assume apparently contradictory stances. In their institutional role, grassroots development bureaucrats claim that they must “sensitize peasants,” in order to modify “peasant mentality” and to lead them to accept change according to the criteria underpinning project intervention. But on different occasions, they are able and willing to deconstruct development rationales and act according to alternative criteria. In some circumstances, aid workers share the perspectives and criteria for action that they characterize as “peasant mentality.” An extensionist and a farmer do not necessarily represent different “worlds of knowledge,” even though the political game in which they occasionally engage provides incentives for them to act as if they did. This chapter’s primary argument is that the “interface” framework tends to project onto the object of study the sociological constructs devised to make sense of it.4 In doing so, it mistakes divisions that exist only in theoretical models and/or political narratives, for real (social and epistemological) interfaces between individuals and groups. As a corollary, it brackets all other possible sets of relations. The notion of separate “lifeworlds” is also problematic. It suggests a boundedness

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that is denied by empirical observations, and it essentializes individual identity, subsuming it with the role attributed to actors within the field of international development. A similar problem is raised by analyses relying, even figuratively, on the notions of donor and recipient “cultures,” or on the opposition between “local” or “indigenous” knowledge and “Western scientific knowledge” (for a cogent critique of this approach, as exemplified by Hobart’s 1993 edited book, see Grillo 1997: 13–14). We need to think less in terms of interfaces between separate worldviews and more in terms of positioned strategies and perspectives. Trajectories should be explained with reference to contextual power differences; to the strategies consciously unfolded by differently positioned agents; and to the institutionalization and distribution of historically shaped roles and relations, that is, roles and relations that are unconsciously appropriated by agents through socialization and have developed in the course of history in specific sociocultural contexts (such as the roles and identities that informants characterize as “traditional”). Different groups in the development field are often well aware of the chances available to them within policy discourses and may adjust strategically and instrumentally to their ascribed roles. The appearance of incommensurability between the “worlds” of farmers and extensionists is often created by the capacity of social actors to conform to the roles ascribed to them by dominant discourses. Institutions compensate agents who abide by their rules, making conformity a more convenient, albeit not the only, option (see Douglas 1987). Hence, by conforming to their recipient role, Keita farmers stand more chances to reap some benefits from project activities; by reproducing policy narratives, development workers strengthen their bargaining position in the development field; and planners align their arguments with dominant development paradigms to find support for their plans. This chapter provides a particular example of the epistemological negotiations of grassroots development workers and so-called recipients vis-à-vis overarching policies. Development workers strive to enroll villagers in the policy models that sustain project intervention. But their institutional role for the project should not be seen as a bounded worldview. On particular occasions, aid workers are able to reflect critically about development institutions and their roles within them, and choose to enroll in recipients’ trajectories. In turn, recipients are less locked into a lifeworld than they are into temporarily attempting to turn development rationales to their own ends. I am not suggesting

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that agents should be reduced to calculating strategists, consciously maximizing their chances in all circumstances. In fact, a major challenge to anthropologists studying “development” settings today consists precisely in distinguishing between conscious strategic action (e.g., when brokers in development perform a “role” to attract projects to their village) and attitudes and dispositions that are produced unconsciously (e.g., when a Nigerien provincial functionary reenacts colonial rhetorical styles in formal speech and text). The remaining part of the chapter is divided in three main sections. The first section outlines the policy narrative that underpinned the establishment of the Keita Project in the early 1980s. The second section highlights continuities and differences between this narrative and the representations of grassroots development bureaucrats working for the project, trying to assess how they relate to their role in development, and whether they could be seen to represent a world of knowledge. Finally, the chapter turns to the attitudes of local men and women toward the project. It uses a case study to illustrate the ambivalence of the position of development workers and the flexibility of donor and recipient roles.

The narrative of desertification as a policy model Throughout the 1970s the notions of “rural development” and “desertification” grew in influence and became used in a mutually reinforcing way. This decade saw the creation of specialized institutions within the UN system and the OECD body, which contributed to the production of forms of knowledge and practices that, in turn, paved the way for the spread of Integrated Rural Development Projects aimed at “fighting against desertification” in the Sahel. The Keita Project was to become an exemplary model of antidesertification interventions. In December 1982 a joint identification mission, in which the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), an Italian team, and the CILSS (Comité permanent Inter Etats de Lutte Contre la Sécheresse au Sahel, i.e., the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel) participated, laid out an outline of problems related to desertification, soil erosion, and drought afflicting the Keita District in the Department of Tahoua. A second mission was sent by the cooperation section of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in March–April 1983 in the same area, resulting in the formulation of an “Operational Plan for the Integrated Rural Development Project of Keita” (GICO

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1998: 12). This document contained the foundations for the establishment of the Keita Project. On December 6, 1983, the governments of Italy and of Niger signed an agreement that assigned to FAO the project’s execution. The World Food Program of the United Nations (WFP) would provide food for work rations for local labor working for the project. By 1998, the Keita Project was still financially the most important project of all Italian interventions in the Sahel, and of all FAO and WFP interventions in Niger (GICO 1998: 36–37). In 1972 the UN Conference on the Human Environment was convened in Stockholm. The main outcomes of the conference were a recommendation for a new specialized agency and a commitment of financial support from the major donor countries. Consequently, later the same year, the General Assembly crafted the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). In 1973 the Office to Combat Desertification and Drought, or United Nations Special Sahel Office (UNSO) of the UNDP, was created in response to drought in the Sahel region. The first major international forum to discuss the problem of desertification was the United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNCOD), convened in Nairobi in 1977, which resulted in the adoption of the Plan of Action to Combat Desertification, and in the establishment of UNEP’s Desertification Branch (MacDonald 1986). The Sahelian states most directly affected by the 1968–73 drought reacted in concert, leading to the emergence of a Sahel subregional perspective, with the creation of the CILSS. A few years later, the “Club du Sahel” was created as an informal structure for donor consultation and “information and discussion on longterm Sahel development” (de Lattre and Fell 1984: 44) which would be serviced by the OECD and would be opened to non-OECD countries as well. The CILSS/Club du Sahel 1980 “Strategy for Drought Control and development in the Sahel” is a vivid example of the kind of arguments that would inform the Keita Project’s objectives. Here, “desertification” is described in the following terms: the advancing desert, a decrease in the yield of traditional crops linked with a deterioration of the soil affecting ever larger areas, a deterioration of grazing lands, and deforestation, not only around the capitals and larger cities, but also around the villages. This is an indication that the natural balance between the populations of the Sahel and the natural environment has been upset, and that there are no steps in the direction of an acceptable new balance; the Sahel no

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longer lives from its income alone, but is drawing on its capital in land and forests. If a strategy for food self sufficiency must be implemented through an increase in production resulting in still greater consumption of natural capital, this strategy is invalid. The Sahel’s resources in land, in grazing, and in wood are limited, and in one generation, the region may be on the verge of being completely taken over by the desert. (CILSS and Club du Sahel 1980: 8–9) The “population” is presented as part of the problem, and knowledge about it is sought in order to induce changes in its practices. In a section entitled “gradual assumption of responsibility for development by the producers,” the CILSS–Club du Sahel 1980 Strategy continues: In order to pave the way for changes in the production system, and to then accompany this transformation, a series of outside interventions are needed to demonstrate new production models to the farmer or livestock producer, to motivate him [sic] to change, and to help him acquire the new techniques. The option for mass development precludes that the change of system take place solely through outside action. The objective is to make the producers capable of gradually assuming responsibility for the change in production methods, to meet the needs of the region and improve their own conditions of existence. (CILSS and Club du Sahel 1980: 21) The correspondence between environmental breakdown and social inadequacy to deal with problems is also present in Italian documents, and it fulfills the same function of calling for external intervention. In 1985 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published Paoletti and Taliani’s “Territorial Reality and Development Policy” (1984), a reflection on the authors’ sociological appraisal of the intervention area of the Keita Project. The study was conducted at project inception in order to identify appropriate modes of intervention. Here, the process of ecological degradation in the Ader Doutchi Majiya region is linked to social “discouragement.” Both are presented as potentially fatal threats that must be addressed without delay:

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At least from our experience of study and research in “marginal realities” in Third world countries, one derives the suggestion to intervene before it is too late. Once the physical-environmental equilibrium is compromised, conditions of unfeasibility [inagibilità] are created so that no stimulus whatsoever, be it social or economic, can remove the populations from their positions: discouragement becomes a crucial element of their way of being and reflecting about the world around them. (Paoletti and Taliani 1984: 16, footnote) In the early 1980s, in Niger, the organs of the Development Society held two workshops in which representatives of all ministries, all of the country’s departments, and national and international development organizations and donors participated. These were the Zinder Seminar on Rural Development Intervention Strategies (Séminaire National sur les Stratégies d’Intervention en Milieu Rural, Zinder, 15–22 November 1982) and the Maradi Engagement for the Fight Against Desertification (Engagement de Maradi sur la Lutte contre la Désertification, Maradi, 21–28 May 1984). The programmatic documents that resulted from these events appeared at the beginning of the Keita Project’s establishment in the Tahoua Department and provided the policy guidelines for the orientation of the project’s activities. In the Zinder Seminar, the emphasis falls on the “peasant’s” role. It is argued repeatedly (République du Niger 1982: 13–15) that the peasant must “take conscience” (prise de conscience) of the necessity to change his or her lifestyle, production methods, and social organization. The Zinder Seminar text states that the “politics of the fight against desertification” (1982: 15) must be founded upon the “conscious and responsible participation [participation consciente et responsible] of the populations” (1982: 14). The Maradi Engagement argues that the “politics of the fight against desertification” will follow multiple strategies, including “sensitizing and mobilizing the populations in view of their voluntary and responsible participation to actions of fighting against desertification” (République du Niger 1984: 9). This is repeated in the long list of recommendations that concludes the document, calling for “the implementation, under the supervision of the Development Society, of actions to fight against desertification, involving the voluntary and conscious participation of the populations” (1984: 24). Throughout the 1980s, international and national development organizations proffered a coherent view of the causes and remedies of

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desertification in the Sahel (see Leach and Mearns 1996). They emphasized the role of the population, its obligation to “take conscience” (prise de conscience) of the necessity for change, and to “assume responsibility” (responsabilisation) for the impact of its practices upon the environment. Representations of identity are not neutral. They ascribe needs, rights, and duties and imply moral and programmatic evaluations of who can deal with problems, who is a problem, and how certain actors should change and conduct their life. The desertification narrative characterizes rural Nigeriens, specifically their practices and beliefs, as part of the problems affecting the country. It establishes that rural Nigeriens must be led to understand the problems they face as they are expressed by the desertification narrative, and they must assume responsibility for the introduction of new practices identified by “expert” studies and endorsed by policy statements. This has direct implications for at least two categories of actors: the “target population,” which is given a place and a role within the fight against desertification; and project staff, who are responsible for implementing a set of activities in relation to the environment and for “converting” local men and women to the fight against desertification. This second task is referred to as “sensitizing the peasant” and figures prominently in project staff perceptions of their own role. The following section shows that project extensionists tend to reproduce the desertification narrative when commenting about Niger’s situation. However, in practice, not only do project staff reflect critically about received policy wisdoms, but they are fully enmeshed with local dynamics.

Project agents, “underdevelopment,” and sensibilisation Until the year 2000, the Keita Project conducted a broad range of operations over an area of about 13,000 square kilometers, including approximately 400 villages and 330,000 inhabitants. Its environmental rehabilitation strategies, including soils and water conservation techniques and the construction of small dams, improved the living conditions of the target population by making available new sources of water and fodder and by creating employment opportunities. Most of the 400 villages falling in the intervention area know the project through its “fight against desertification” work sites (chantiers de lutte contre la désertification). People working on the project’s work sites are remunerated in food-for-work rations. Because almost all adult men

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(between 18 and 35 years) migrate seasonally to find manual jobs in Niamey, or in cities in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, the project’s labor force consists mainly of women and adolescents. Project works stop, or decrease substantially, in the rainy season, when men come back from abroad to work in their fields. Project staff members are organized into “divisions,” which are specialized units dealing with sectoral activities. In 1999–2000, the project included seven divisions. It counted about 100 employees, including guards, drivers, mechanics, and electricians (PDR/ADM 2000). Each division occupies two or three locales in the project building and comprises a division chief (Chef de Division), his or her vice (Adjoint), and other staff members whose number and functions vary substantially across divisions. Here, the focus is on permanent staff who are an integral part of the “project team” and are based at the project headquarters in Keita. Although none of these agents comes from the region where the project operates, in almost twenty years of work they have acquired an important role in all aspects of local relations with the project. National project staff is almost entirely composed of Nigerien public servants, temporarily released from their public functions and allocated to the Keita Project. Members of staff represent local people as reticent to adopt the innovations prescribed by national and international development policies, and they see it as their task to make the inhabitants of villages eligible as recipients of project aid. This group of actors express views that are remarkably consistent with development narratives related to desertification in Niger. They perceive desertification and rain scarcity as the country’s main problem and they think of externally financed development projects as the only solution. The chief of the environment division characterized “underdevelopment” as follows: I think the greatest problem of Niger is desertification. Until the ecologic environment is reconstituted, any other development action is destined to failure. . . . With the demographic push, soils have been overexploited, they were totally impoverished, they became sterile, trees have disappeared. The owner of the land [was] abandoned, facing water and wind erosion! It is necessary, then, to fight against this desertification, to reconstitute the ecology and recuperate the lands, to plant trees that will protect the soils against water erosion, and allow local people to have access

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to cultivable lands and develop agrarian techniques which increase agricultural productivity. The fishery expert of the project also thinks that “the first problem of Niger is desertification,” and the officer responsible for the project’s administration links the question of desertification to Niger’s dependence on foreign assistance: The State hasn’t got the means! If you take the phenomena of water erosion and land degradation . . . if you take the glacis of this region . . . it isn’t with handcarts that you can transform that! You need technological means, because today we are at a point at which nature menaces us up to our necks! This can only happen through foreign aid. There is considerable consistency between the views expressed above and international and national diagnoses of Niger’s problems. However, some members of staff seemed to understand “underdevelopment” as a relative and contextual condition, the awareness of which is induced from the outside. Rahmatou5 of the monitoring and evaluation division illustrated this point with a culinary example: Underdevelopment is a disposition [un état d’âme]. It is a way of perceiving things that pushes me to say that you are underdeveloped, but, inside you, you know that you are not: it’s a question of habits. You are used to eating pasta, you will continue to eat pasta, but I . . . today I eat pasta, tomorrow I eat rice, the day after something else. . . . To make you realize that you are underdeveloped, I should invite you at my place and offer you pasta today, rice tomorrow, meat on the following day. So when you’ll go back at your place, you’ll tell a third person: you know, there is the possibility of not eating pasta everyday, and you will explore this path of change. In Rahmatou’s opinion, this system works by “inducing aspirations”: an individual or a country is made underdeveloped by being made aware of alternative possibilities that they should aspire to.6 The United Nations is sometimes seen as responsible for ranking countries and

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urging them to achieve certain standards. Thus, Aboubacar, working for the monitoring and evaluation division, argued, The UNDP and the World Bank, for instance, make periodical macro-economic studies, to be able to say . . . Africa, or Niger: here are the indicators, here is the level of poverty, here is the level of revenues, here is the sanitary coverage . . . they tell politicians and development actors: this is the level you are at, this is the rank you occupy . . . and they stimulate them to move forward, to improve. The officer responsible for the food-for-work logistics expressed a similar opinion: “In general, various UN agencies in different sectors will tell a country: here is your indicator . . . really, you are in red . . . this is what you have to do.” These statements suggest that, to project staff, the concept of “underdevelopment,” which they have become used to applying to their country and themselves, acquires significance only through integration into an international system of meaning and classification. Project agents are familiar with development rationales and are not naïve with regard to their own and their country’s position in international hierarchies. They know through direct experience that to increase their room to maneuver in this system, and derive benefits from it, they must comply with its rhetorics and rationales. The inhabitants of the Ader Doutchi Majiya have not been trained in modern institutions and lack a full command of policy jargon. Project agents see it as their task to make villagers express their problems in ways congruent with the project’s program. They act as brokers and mediators between positions familiar to them. In this process, they render a double service: They provide “beneficiaries” to the development apparatus; and they ease access to the “development revenue” for local villagers (Neubert 2000: 256). The ways in which those “to be developed” are conceptualized and represented in the agents’ institutional discourse provide a legitimization for their reformist task.

“The peasant’s mentality” and “sensitization” One of the factors most commonly mentioned as a problem for Niger was the “mentality” [mentalité] of “the peasant” [le paysan]. The belief that “the problem of Nigeriens is purely a problem of mentality” (Rahmatou) was very common among project staff. A grassroots agent of

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the agronomy division claimed, “Certain peasants are hard headed and don’t understand things easily.” And the head of the environment division said, “[The peasant’s] mentality is diffident, you must know them well and they must trust you, before they will listen to what you have to say.” Rahmatou expressed this view in an articulate way: Now, the world today requires people to change, things to change: one shouldn’t remain static [il ne faut pas rester stationnaire]. The problem of Nigeriens is purely a problem of mentality: there is a blockage which makes him [sic] not want to change. . . . I can tell myself: if I exit this office and go into the other office, what will I find? Isn’t it that I might die in that office? Ah, if I put this in my head, it’s the end! I am never going to get out of my office. Hassan, working at the monitoring and evaluation division, emphasized the importance of field agents’ approach to deal with “the peasant’s” alleged diffidence: Often peasants are hostile to all change. For instance, if you take an illiterate peasant . . . he cannot rapidly perceive the utility of an intervention: you will have to create the conditions to be able to advance with him. First, you will have to make the peasant understand what will be the result [of the change], what is the aim, what interest there is in doing so . . . this is sensitization [c’est ça la sensibilisation]. . . . You will have to adapt the process so that he can understand the objective. I am telling you . . . the peasant is very diffident, but his diffidence is justified: if you have certain habits, it will be hard for you to change them. Ali, also working in the monitoring and evaluation department, defined sensitization as follows: “Sensitization means to go to someone and try to make him reason, to involve him, to attract his attention on a number of points.” And Yacouba (from the same division), argued, Through sensitization one has to bring information where it is needed, to bring someone to awareness of what is

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really happening [prendre conscience de ce qui se passe en réalité]. Peasants have a peculiar comprehension, which is not always obvious, not always logic . . . certain phenomena, people live them, but they don’t know exactly where they come from, what is at the origin, and what has to be done to fight them: it is sensitization and demonstration actions that can lead them to adopt other behaviors, to acquire new competences. The project’s fishery expert provided an example from his own field to clarify the notion of “sensitization”: Someone who is older than 50 or even 60 years old, who has never seen a fish before . . . his ancestral habits are inculcated in his head and it is very difficult to convince him . . . even if eventually he might accept, a real combat is required! What sort of combat? For example, you are a peasant [paysan] and I am a technician [technicien] of this matter . . . to make you accept a novelty, what can I do? I myself, I can go fishing . . . a demonstration . . . I can go fishing, return, prepare my fish, eat it . . . every day I will manage so that you are always next to me. You will observe me eating: has anything bad happened to me because I was eating fish? I have to repeat this day after day . . . you will observe and reflect. For me, sensitization [sensibilisation] is a practical approach to convince the individual: you must do it yourself, you who are an officer [un cadre], because theory . . . with the peasant . . . it really doesn’t work! . . . You know, our Nigerien world . . . it’s not only the water problem! If I take the social group “peasant” . . . “backward peasant”[paysan reculé] . . . there is a great diffidence by the part of these peasants with regard to all innovation. Nasser (extensionist of the public works division, see the following section) also emphasizes the approach: Populations are available . . . what they lack is the approach and the sensitization [sensibilisation]. They know the nature

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of the problem already, but they must be sensitized to be led to fight against this problem. . . . Sensitization must also be accompanied by application. When you say something to people at the beginning, it enters [their ears] and it goes. They will say “one day a gentleman came to explain us . . . voilà, voilà, voilà . . . ,” but people will not believe you unless you pass to action. The peasant . . . he knows well . . . he has his ancient method which he conserves, which he has received from the elders. For him, all modern technique is a risk, it isn’t safe. The engineer responsible for public works in the local administration thought that peasants are open . . . but they don’t have the same level of reasoning. They have their lifestyle, which is really different from ours: the peasant has his livestock, he has his field, his environment, the well . . . for him, the world ends there! . . . But they are not closed, really: if they see that an operation is profitable, they have no reason not to accept. A good sensitization is needed to bring the peasant to accept a certain number of notions. Everyone working for the project thought that Niger’s poverty was the outcome of environmental factors, broadly referred to as “desertification.” In their institutional role, grassroots development workers entertain views that are in conformity with the rationales underpinning the Keita Project’s intervention. The legitimacy of their own role is dependent upon the narrative of desertification and development. These narratives do not lack empirical foundation: Water scarcity is perceived by all the inhabitants of the Ader as the major obstacle to their well-being. Many development workers in Niger recognize erosion and famine as one of the country’s main problems and have internalized a belief in the superiority of foreign technical solutions. But some project workers think reflexively about their roles. They understand “underdevelopment” as following from the integration of Niger into a world system in which countries are ranked and induced to comply to externally set standards.

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Sensitization is the specialized institution through which project staff mediate between developmental rationales and local perspectives. The role ascribed to development workers in the desertification narrative examined earlier requires them to present “peasants” as locked into a different “mentality,” which it is their task to reform. Like all narratives (ironically, including academic ones), the desertification narrative creates discursive divisions, boundaries, “interfaces,” and morally colored identities. This fiction allows project staff to justify their role and function. At first sight, this produces the image of two bounded constituencies, belonging to different material, social, and epistemological worlds, an image that is reinforced by statements such as the final quote given above: “the peasant has his [sic] livestock, he has his field, his environment, the well . . . for him, the world ends there!” Yet, the remaining part of the paper shows that the position of development agents is ambivalent, and their disposition with regard to aid policy and local farmers varies depending on context, and individual attitudes and experiences. The following section enquires into recipients’ perceptions of project activities. With the exception of an exiguous elite, men and women living in the Ader Doutchi Majiya do not comment upon Niger’s position in the international scene. Their views about the project do not overlap entirely with those of development workers. Yet through sensitization they are made aware of project objectives, which reflect trends in development policy. They are highly receptive to such knowledge and use it to manipulate externally crafted policies to achieve locally relevant ends. Project staff members are also entangled with recipient practices and perceptions. In their mutual practical relations (as opposed to their reciprocal official representations), aid recipients and aid workers can hardly be seen as belonging to separate lifeworlds. Rather, they are aware of the possibilities available to them by virtue of their respective roles, and they unfold strategies commensurate to their status and positioning.

Local perceptions of development: the women’s field operation in Gidan Rabo Local attitudes toward the project vary according to gender and class. Whereas women emphasize the food-for-work component, men are more likely to mention the environmental impact of project activities. Although members of poorer and lower-status households tend to

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pool their individual incomes to achieve household subsistence, some distinctions can be made along gender lines. Project food rations are a short-term contribution to the household’s livelihood, with a particular impact on women’s status and income. In the midterm, the works carried out by the project increase the productivity of the factors of production (water and fodder availability, land productivity) controlled mostly by men. Project works, therefore, are equivalent to a slack-season income for women (who remain in the village while the men migrate) and to a mid- to long-term investment in the means of production for men. Both men and women are consistent in wanting to attract project intervention to their villages, because it provides a “development revenue” in addition to the limited sources of income available. There is intervillage competition over project interventions, and villages of different status attempt to “capture” project works at the expense of their neighbors. In 1995, under the influence of Gender and Development (GAD) policies, the Keita Project embarked into an operation aimed at giving the women of Gidan Rabo (a pseudonym) exclusive and inalienable control over a rehabilitated parcel situated at the outskirts of their village. In the project there were considerable expectations about the “revolutionary” potential of this type of operation with regard to women’s status and empowerment, and in 1995 it was suggested that the women of Gidan Rabo bought a restored parcel. All adult women were consulted, and they expressed an interest in the operation. That the issue was not a priority to them was clear by the scarce enthusiasm that they displayed in the course of preliminary arrangements. Nasser was the project agent selected to negotiate the terms of this operation with interested parties in Gidan Rabo. This was due to his special acquaintance with this village, where he had lived for an extended period of time when he came to the project to do a stage for the achievement of his professional qualification. Once he completed his studies, with a dissertation on the project’s impact on the catchment system where Gidan Rabo is located, he was employed by the project as a technical agent. Because of his special ties with Gidan Rabo, he was jokingly nicknamed the “sous préfet de Gidan Rabo.”7 During his stay in the village he had acquired rights to a plot of land, the produce of which he collects after every harvest. In the discussions between the (male) landowners and Nasser, the “gendered nature” of the operation was never mentioned, even though the whole point of the transaction (at least in the original project’s intentions) was to target women. Project documents, the results of an FAO

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consultancy, justified it as a transfer from men to women, that is, the actors least likely to “buy land with money.” But at the meeting between the owners and Nasser, as well as in the actual degree of mobilization of women themselves, the question of “women’s empowerment” appeared to be marginal to everyone’s interests. The transaction, which would shift land from men to women, was described as “passing property from one pocket to the other” in the negotiations that preceded it. Dealing with the owners’ reticence to sell their plot, Nasser commented, “Once rehabilitated, [this land] will return to you anyway: one parcel will also go to a member of your family. . . . It is like shifting property from one pocket to the other.” The fact that the member would be a wife or a daughter did not seem to be relevant. The owners, who were the village chief and his brother, owned more productive parcels around the village than the 5-hectare parcel in question, but insisted bargaining and proposed an unrealistically high price. Nasser counterproposed a much lower price and supported his offer with an example: “Although the sum is not very high,” he argued, the benefits will be great. It is like someone who, having had an accident, asks for a compensation of 10 million Francs. When he consults Justice, he obtains an offer of 10,000. But it can happen that, because of his insistence, they lower the offer to 7,000. Dissatisfied, the same person goes to Niamey, and maybe there they refuse to give him anything at all. This is a small part of the inheritance you are going to leave to your children. All these lands belong to you, and this parcel counts little. Taking up this last cue, the owners emphasized that this land was destined to their heirs, and they could not dispose of it lightly. They lowered their original offer, without accepting Nasser’s. Negotiations continued for some time, until an agreement was reached. Nasser concluded the meeting with another example, emphasizing shared values and identity between him and the owners, which he contrasted to “Western” values: Once rehabilitated, [the land] will return to you anyway: one parcel will also go to a member of your family. It is just like taking something from your left hand and passing it

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over to the right hand. Our tradition is not like the customs in the West [Turai, lit. Europe]. Among us, a man can take something from his brother and give it away, but in the end they will reach an agreement. Western people would bring him to court. In this final statement, Nasser identifies himself with the interests of the owners, rhetorically shifting his positioning from representative of “Western” aid policies, to fellow Nigerien and Gidan Rabo “insider.” For Gidan Rabo’s women, the intended beneficiaries of the operation, the transaction would not make a great difference. Single women would end up having a parcel smaller than 20 by 20 meters, which, as we shall see, on glacis land, is not even worth the effort of cultivating. Nevertheless, in July 1995 the women of Gidan Rabo bought 5 hectares of rehabilitated land from the owners and redistributed the perimeter amongst themselves in subparcels of equal extension. Women were asked to repay the project loan in two years, but the project manager’s idea was that the money they would return could be made available to the same women in the form of a social fund. It soon became clear that the operation failed to give the expected results. The women of Gidan Rabo cultivated the fields they had acquired only in the first year, immediately after the project’s subsoiling. Since then, rainy season after rainy season, project staff members were sent to Gidan Rabo to check whether women were taking advantage of their newly acquired plots, but every season new excuses were provided by the villagers, men and women alike, for not having done so. In 1999, the fourth year since the acquisition of the field, a gender consultancy came to visit the project and organized a meeting with Gidan Rabo women to assess the results of the operation. This time, the unanimous explanation provided by the women was that they had not cultivated their fields because there was no enclosure, and animals could enter the parcels and destroy the young plants. They therefore wanted the project to give them iron wire to build an enclosure. Some men supported the women’s account. Iron wire is expensive and can be put to many uses more profitable than enclosing fields, for which the traditional method consists in using locally available thorny shrubs. Project representatives suggested that they resort to “traditional methods,” or that they pay for the wire; the project could have assisted them in obtaining it at a wholesale price. At this point, the village chief stated that village men could have paid for the wire, but what the village really

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needed from the project was to deal with their water problem. Swiftly, other men began explaining that the first dam built by the project for their village had been vital, but that they needed another one because water reserves did not last for the whole year. Women agreed that water was a priority problem for the whole village. One woman said that when the dam dried up, in the dry season, she would have to walk all the way to a distant well. Other women agreed. Some women said that transhumant herders used a lot of their dam’s water and did not leave enough water for their own livestock. Guidan Rabo’s men and women subscribed to the operation first and foremost to strengthen the village ties with the project and thereby to invest in a social relation that would bring potential benefits to Guidan Rabo. When, sometime after the meeting described, I asked my friend Salamatou why women had agreed to the operation in the first place, she told me that they were being kind to the project. Hajiya, who had considerable experience of project rehabilitation works, told me that women had taken the land because the project manager had given it to them to thank them for their hard work in the work sites. Villages falling within the project intervention area are competing with one another over project activities. There is always something to gain from project interventions. The entire village would have strengthened its relation with the project, because the creation of a “women’s plot” was likely to attract other activities and to increase the chances of contacts with project staff. These occasions are sought mainly in the hope that new work sites be opened, possibly to deal with Gidan Rabo’s crucial problem, water scarcity, but also because work sites involve the creation of slack season “jobs” and the availability of food-for-work. Even though, from the project’s point of view, the operation fell short in the “gender” agenda, it is not for its impact on gender relations that it was relevant to Gidan Rabo’s men and women. Their behavior at various reunions suggests that they were taking this chance (which happened to be presented in gender terms) in order to invest in their relations with the project and obtain benefits that do not involve a reallocation of power between men and women.

Conclusion At first sight, the evidence discussed in this chapter suggests that this is an “offer-driven process” (Neubert 2000: 255), which relies on sensitization to create a demand for the types of goods and services that projects

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can supply at any one time. But, applying de Certeau’s reasoning to development, the development apparatus exerts a limited control on the “ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order” (de Certeau 1984: xiii). Consumers of development are engaged in another form of production. From their perspective, projects make available a set of opportunities in the intervention area. They unfold a myriad of tactics to take advantage of these opportunities in ways consonant to their lifestyles, and their adoption of development rationalities takes place (through sensitization) only at a superficial level. Grassroots development workers, who, in their institutional capacity, reproduce development narratives, know that they are acting as brokers between different value systems. But agents are more than actors performing roles strategically. Under what social and historical conditions do people stop “believing” and start questioning? When does an implicit disposition (the functionary’s relation to the world and to others) become an objectified role among many? When are agents unconsciously adjusted to their positions, and when are they willing to reflect critically upon these positions, invest in other roles, forge new discursive alliances, and enroll in other trajectories? Actor-oriented approaches to the study of development are well placed to unravel the complexity of the relations between different groups interacting in development arenas (see, for example, Arce and Long 1993). However, the “lifeworlds” image and the “interface” framework can be misleading. Roles are more flexible than these metaphors suggest and are continuously renegotiated depending on context and intersubjectivity. Project staff members are capable and willing to reformulate their roles according to changing circumstances. They may argue that “peasant mentality” must be reformed, but they are not unaware of the ideological nature of reformist discourses. In practice, they are inextricably intertwined with local politics and exchange relations. The reticence of Nasser, in the women’s fields operation, to even attempt to explain the gendered nature of the operation to the landowners suggests that he is aware of the irrelevance of certain criteria to local actors. But Nasser also lived one year in Gidan Rabo and owns a parcel of land at the village outskirts. His positioning toward village elders is ambivalent. He relates to them as a representative of the project, as well as a tenant. He might be their son-in-law, or they may share a relative working in a ministry in Niamey. Although here I have chosen to use the example of Nasser and Gidan Rabo’s villagers, almost every village in the intervention area has its Nasser. Project staff members have manifold

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relations with people in a number of villages, and men and women in almost each village can make a claim to alliance with one or two project workers. Development bureaucrats are enrolled in multiple projects at the same time. Officially, they are enrolled in the “developers” project, and this role may appear so primary to researchers predisposed to focus on it as to be turned into a “world of knowledge” and separated by an “interface” from the roles attributed to other “lifeworlds.” But this does not help to explain the frequent occasions when development workers choose to enroll in the projects of local actors. Such instances may occur when they are paying tribute to kinship or other social obligations; when they are investing in social relations with powerful people; or if they expect to receive a return for their cooperation with different categories of actors amongst the target population. Commenting on the duplicity of the role of brokers in development, Lund highlights the contrast between “front-stage” discourses and “back-stage” commentaries (Lund 2001), and Olivier de Sardan argues that, in contemporary Africa, civil servants find themselves in a “schizophrenic situation”: “their administrative and professional legitimacy is derived from their training in modern European administration. . . . But their social legitimacy implies . . . that they act in conformity with more or less contradictory ‘sociocultural’ logics” (Olivier de Sardan 1999: 48). Patterns of behavior inherited from the colonial legacy and other historical trajectories shape people’s conduct through socialization and beyond conscious awareness, working like a habitus. Other behaviors are strategic and instrumental. Anthropological analyses of development are beginning to develop conceptual tools to explain the relation between unconscious dispositions (being-in-itself) and the strategic stances of social actors. This nexus is difficult to grasp in terms of theories that attribute more permanence and fixity to worlds of knowledge across epistemological interfaces.

Notes 1. “Lifeworlds exist as specific time, space and experiential configurations . . ., where some coexist, some clash, some mix, and others separate and retreat into themselves” (Arce and Long 1999: 13). 2. This chapter is based on two years of research in the Ader Doutchi Majiya region of Niger, where the Keita Project operates, and draws on semistructured interviews and participant observation conducted between 1998 and 2000. After 2000, project approaches underwent a

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major reorientation. In order to make the text less cumbersome, I have used the present tense throughout. However, the situation described in the paper applies to the period 1983–2000 only. Literally, kai ya waye means “the head has been enlightened.” A similar fallacy has been attributed to Hegel’s idealist philosophy by Marx and to structuralist kinship approaches by Bourdieu (1990). All the names of persons mentioned in this chapter are pseudonyms. The example chosen by Rahmatou is subtly ironic: She works for an Italian project, but in her example it is the “underdeveloped” who eat pasta every day (a typical caricature of Italians and surely not a Nigerien habit). Sous Préfets are the official state authorities present in district capitals (in this case, Keita). The joke refers both to the marginality of the small, low-status settlement of Guidan Rabo and to the status of Nasser. His undeniable political skills and de facto influence among the target population made this title particularly appropriate. It caricatured the lack of formal authority of Nasser (the only place where he could be a Sous Préfet would be a village like Guidan Rabo). But it also commented ironically on the limits of influence of real Sous Préfets.

References Arce, A., and N. Long. 1993. Bridging two worlds: An ethnography of bureaucrat-peasant relations in Western Mexico. In An anthropological critique of development: The growth of ignorance, edited by M. Hobart. London: Routledge, pp. 179–208. Arce, A., and N. Long. 1999. Anthropology, development and modernities: Exploring discourses, counter-tendencies and violence. London: Routledge. Bierschenk, T. 1988. Development projects as arenas of negotiation for strategic groups: A case study from Benin. Sociologia Ruralis XXVIII(2/3):146–160. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Certeau, M. de. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. CILSS (Comité Inter-états de Lutte contre la Séchéresse dans le Sahel) and Club du Sahel. 1980. Strategy for drought control and development in the Sahel. Unpublished Document. Douglas, M. 1987. How institutions think. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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GICO. 1998. Valutazione del programma di sviluppo rurale integrato dell’Ader Doutchi Maggia. Rapporto Finale. Roma: MAE. Grillo, R. 1997. Discourses of development: The view from anthropology. In Discourses of development: Anthropological perspectives, edited by R. Grillo and R. Stirrat. Oxford: Berg. Hobart, M., ed. 1993. An anthropological critique of development: The growth of ignorance. London: Routledge. Lattre, A. de, and A. Fell. 1984. The Club du Sahel: An experiment in international co-operation. Paris: OECD. Leach, M., and R. Mearns. 1996. The lie of the land: Challenging received wisdom on the African environment. London: James Currey. Long, N. 2001. Development sociology: Actor perspectives. London: Routledge. Long. N., ed. 1989. Encounters at the interface: A perspective on social discontinuities in rural development. Wageningen Sociologische Studies No. 27. Lund, C. 2001. Precarious democratization and local dynamics in Niger: Micro-politics in Zinder. Development and Change 32:845–869. MacDonald, L. 1986. Natural resources development in the Sahel: The role of the United Nations system. Tokyo: United Nations University. Neubert, D. 2000. Le role des couriers locaux dans le système du développement. In Courtiers en développement: Les villages Africains en quête de projets, edited by T. Bierschenk, J.P. Chauveau, and J.P. Olivier de Sardan. Paris: Karthala. Olivier de Sardan, J.P. 1999. L’espace publique introuvable: Chefs et projets dans les villages Nigériens. Revue Tiers Monde 157:139–167. PDR/ADM (Projet de Développement Rural/Ader Doutchi Majiya). 2000. Rapport administratif et financier: Etat des réalisations au 20/04/ 2000. Keita. Paoletti, P., and E. Taliani. 1984. Realtà territoriale e politica di sviluppo. Roma: Istituto Italo-Africano. République du Niger. 1982. Séminaire nationale sur les stratégies d’intervention en milieu rural. Zinder 15–22 Novembre 1982. Conseil Militaire Suprême. Ministère du Développement Rural. République du Niger. 1984. L’engagement de Maradi sur la Lutte contre la désertification. Niamey: Conseil Militaire Suprême. Conseil National de Développement. Tidjani-Alou, M. 2000. Courtiers malgré eux.trajectoires de reconversion dans l’Association Timidria au Niger’. In Courtiers en développement: Les villages Africains en quête de projets, edited by T. Bierschenk, J.P. Chauveau, and J.P. Olivier de Sardan. Paris: Karthala.

THREE RESOURCES, IDEOLOGIES, AND NATIONALISM

The Politics of Development in Malaysia Amity A. Doolittle Taking the case of Sabah, Malaysia, this chapter is an exploration of the idea that rural development, which determines access to and claims over natural resources, is a mechanism of state rule that legitimizes centralized control over marginal people and their lands.1 The chapter shows how political patronage systems and rural development programs combine in the exercise of power over people and natural resources in Sabah. In a pattern that James Ferguson (1994) considers pervasive, development programs may not raise the standard of living, as they are expected to, but they do facilitate the expansion and entrenchment of the ruling, national ideology at the local level. In the context of Malaysia, the ideology of Malayization and Islamization of citizens, under the guise that these characteristics are “necessary” and “normal” components of a modern state, is one of the most common outcomes of rural development projects. As a result development plays a large role in the state’s claim to legitimacy; it is a central strategy for building a modern nation in which narrower concepts of national identity are integrated into local life (Majid Cooke 1999, 2002).2 One of my aims, then, is to understand the political consequences of development programs through an investigation of the discursive practices and social processes found in the daily practice of development. In the first part of this analysis I examine the wider ideological and political context of development in Malaysia. In the second section, I use a case study to demonstrate the ways in which the development political 51

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machinery works at the local level, how state authorities construct and justify development interventions, and how local people variously reject, embrace, and modify state-sponsored images of modernity. This analysis looks for ways in which marginalized rural people find room to maneuver within state development projects. However, rather than manipulating or modifying the development machinery to improve local livelihoods according to local conceptualizations of need (cf. Rossi, Chapter 2, this volume), local people in Sabah express their conformity with development projects in order to benefit from development within the parameters of the state rationalities of modernity. This is perhaps not surprising considering that Prime Minister Mahathir himself maintains that it is sometimes necessary to limit civil and political rights in order to provide material goods for society (Weiss and Hassan 2003: 7). Regardless, is it important to look closely at the cultural practices that emerge at the interface of state and society in order to better understand how state hegemony operates and how the recipients of development struggle to modify the state’s representation of marginal people. In the third section, I raise the question of whether development programs are successful at fulfilling objectives that are hidden behind the rhetoric of poverty alleviation. I conclude that development programs in Sabah are only partially successful at legitimizing state authority at the local level. Although extension of the federal government’s bureaucratic reach does occur as a result of development programs, local people are also able to demystify the prevailing ideology and self-consciously conform to their expected roles in order to receive the benefits, no matter how small, of development.

The ideological context of development Wawasan 2020, or Vision 2020, is the master development plan for all of Malaysia conceived by its prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad. The primary stated goal of Wawasan 2020 is to make Malaysia a fully industrialized country with a standard of living similar to that of European nations by the year 2020 (Dentan et al. 1997: 89). Thus, the plan is driven by an ideological commitment to fast-paced economic growth based on commercialization and industrialization. Mahathir has called for an annual economic growth rate of 7 percent for the thirty-year period that started in 1990 (Jayasankaran and Heibert 1997: 19).

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The rural development initiative within Wawasan 2020 is called Gerakan Desa Wawasan (Village Movement Toward Vision, henceforth GDW). The state’s literature on GDW focuses on the transformation of rural agriculture from subsistence to commercial, “productive,” “orderly” agriculture with an emphasis on improved harvests, increased markets, and a growing reliance on new technologies (Beritan Harian 1996: 14). Under GDW, village structure must conform to “modern activities and industries” (Beritan Harian 1996: 2) and rural people must learn “highly disciplined work habits” so that they can become involved in the global marketplace (Beritan Harian 1996: 9). Under this conceptualization, there is little room for subsistence farmers, or farmers only partially engaged with the marketplace. The official literature on GDW follows a blueprint of what modern rural development initiatives should look like. The authors pay homage to all the appropriate terms used in the formulation of the contemporary development problematic: Human resources are emphasized over technological solutions, bottom-up versus top-down problem identification is stressed, and, citing Robert Chambers, planners are warned not to overexploit natural resources through “growth mania” (Beritan Harian 1996: 1, 10–11). In his book aimed at uncovering the larger social processes that are influenced by development, Ferguson suggests that such blueprints for development identify a dominant problematic through which the underdeveloped regions of the world are identified. This problematic presupposes a central, unquestioned world-view that, in turn, shapes the nature of development interventions (Ferguson 1994: xiii). But Ferguson argues that development initiatives are more than programs that construct definitions of rural poverty and then aim to alleviate it through technical interventions; they are also ideological screens for other, concealed intentions—mere rhetoric (Ferguson 1994: xiii, 17): By making the intentional blue-print for “development” so highly visible, a “development” project can end up performing extremely sensitive political operations involving the entrenchment and expansion of institutional state power almost invisibly, under the cover of a neutral, technical mission to which no one can object. The “instrument-effect” then is two-fold: alongside the institutional effect of expanding bureaucratic state power is the conceptual or ideological effect of depoliticizing both poverty and the state. (Ferguson 1994: 256)

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Ferguson explicitly argues that the “instrument-effect” of development is unintended by planners and that these outcomes result in powerful forms of “anonymous” control—“authorless strategies” (Ferguson 1994: 20). He centers his exploration of the development industry on the “intelligibility of a series of events and transformations not in the intentions guiding the actions of one or more animating subjects” (Ferguson 1994: 18). The problem with this analysis is that it demotes agency in the development process: Actors appear to be anonymous, automated machines (Mosse 2004). Challenging Ferguson’s “radical critique of development,” Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal (2003: 30 n.101) argue that since state agencies and officials are political creatures . . . one must be careful before seeing entrenchment of state power and extension of the capacity of state agencies as an unintended effects of development. Indeed, state actors interested in development, because they are political animals, may view development quite self-consciously as an instrument to extend state capacities. Importantly, although Ferguson demonstrates that political issues are not raised in the development documents, he fails to demonstrate the “depoliticizing” effects of development discourse in Lesotho (Li 1999). How can development erase politics while pursuing the very task of expanding bureaucratic power (Bending and Rosendo, Chapter 10, this volume; Skaria 2000)? Tania Li (1999) also questions this, pointing out that Ferguson’s study reveals that development officers in Lesotho were quite clear about the role that development could play in strengthening the reach of state power. And even the villagers in Ferguson’s study seem to realize that the development programs’ technical initiatives had the potential to regulate their lives in unacceptable ways, and so they “feigned compliance, ignored them or sabotaged them accordingly” (Ferguson 1994: 296). In Malaysia, state bureaucrats at times are aware of the ways in which development initiatives can be used to extend state capacity through the political message that links nationalism, Islamic faith, and the modernizing of rural agriculturalists. For some members of the Malaysian government, development is intended to be as much about strengthening the Malay-Muslim3 elite as it is about raising the standard of living for the disenfranchised. Evidence of this is seen in the literature on GDW that

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not only outlines the government’s policy on industrialization and economic growth but also includes references to the government’s ideological commitment to Malayization and Islamization. The case study that follows shows how development programs in Sabah have the potential to create a politically charged arena in which relations of power and rule are worked out and reassessed, rather than depoliticizing the countryside, as Ferguson suggests. Li’s (1999) recent work in Indonesia on resettlement programs also highlights the powerful political nature of state development projects that use resettlement and “gifts” of modern social services as a means to take away from villagers the freedom to choose the configuration of their village and the types of agricultural practices that they prefer. Mahathir’s Wawasan 2020 goal of the development of a “Malaysian race working in full and equal partnership” (Jayasankaran and Heibert 1997: 19) implies the subsuming of ethnic identity within a national, Malaysian identity or “race.” Citizens are urged to be Malaysian first and Indian, Dusun, Iban, Penan, or Semai (to name a few of the diverse ethnic groups in Malaysia) second. The government led by the United Malaysia National Organization (UMNO) continues to seek political legitimacy by stressing the importance of Malaysian identity and national unity—a trend that intensified after the 1969 race riots that shook peninsular Malaysia (Case 1995: 73). Wawasan 2020 continues the processes of Malayization of all Malaysian ethnic minorities into a unified class of Malaysian citizens under the guise that these values are part of a “normal” or “natural” developmental path to modernization. Furthermore, development in Malaysia has an Islamic coloring (Dentan et al. 1997: 92) that is reiterated throughout the GDW literature, which repeatedly calls for “spiritual awareness” and for “spiritually uniting people with Allah” (Berita Harian 1996: 3). Khoo, in his intellectual biography of Mahathir, points out that the Mid-Term Review of the Fourth Malaysia Plan, 1981–1985 explicitly suggested that the “universality of Islamic values and the message of modernization it contains” did not conflict with “the value system of the other faiths” and the sharing of these common values will further strengthen the bonds among Malaysians. . . . The values listed in the MidTerm Review of the Fourth Malaysia Plan were exactly the kinds of values Mahathir thought were needed to raise productivity at home, increase competitiveness abroad, and

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ensure political stability always. Among them were “better discipline, more self-reliance and striving for excellence” which together with “thriftiness” and “a more rational and scientific approach in overcoming problems” were “values which are progressive and consistent with the needs of a modernizing and industrializing plural society.” (Khoo 1995: 181; see also Ong 1999: 227) Although generalizations about Islam are treacherous to undertake, Watts (2003: 7) has pointed out that one aspect of Islamic revival, particularly in Malaysia, is the variety of strategic and political tactics that are employed in swaying opinion in the voting booth and in building a parallel civil society. One should not be surprised, therefore, to learn that the Kemas organization, a political arm of UMNO with an agenda to encourage the conversion of people to both Islam and UMNO, is instrumental in rural development initiatives (Crouch 1992: 29; Shamsul 1986).4 Kemas is an acronym for Kemajuan Masyarakat, or Community Progress (or Development). But Kemas also has a richer meaning that appears central to the logic of development; the Malaya meaning of Kemas is “orderly, well kept (as in a house).” Thus the use of Kemas as an acronym for community development has an interesting double meaning, emphasizing the value of “ordering” the social world to achieve progress. The political agenda of Kemas is depoliticized through its agents’ role in development, which includes teaching adult education classes in cooking, sewing, nutrition, and hygiene.5 Out of the 642 villages throughout Malaysia included in GDW between 1991 and 1996, over 75 percent (482) had their programs initiated under Kemas’s authority. In the remaining 160 villages, programs were under the authority of institutions more traditionally associated with rural development, such as the Institute of Land Development and the Institute of Regional Development (Berita Harian 1996: 4).

Federal/state politics: fragmented visions of Malaysian identity The development initiative of Wawasan 2020 must be seated within Malaysia’s past development efforts, the most prominent of which has been the New Economic Plan (NEP), launched in 1971. One of the main objectives of the NEP was to “accelerat[e] the process of restructuring

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Malaysian society to correct economic imbalance, so as to reduce and eventually eliminate the identification of race or ethnicity with economic function.” “Restructuring Malay society” translated into policies that would facilitate the expansion of the Malay educated middle class, which would in turn create a Malay entrepreneurial class, and thereby correct the dominance of this sector by the Chinese and, to a lesser extent, the Indians. The implementation of the NEP involved measures that strongly discriminated against non-Malays. Thus the NEP ushered in a new period in Malaysian politics in which the bumiputra (literally the “sons of the soil”) were given preference over nonbumiputra (e.g., the Chinese and Indians). Governmental agencies were expanded to help Malays go into business, and preference was given to Malays in the distribution of manufacturing licenses, government contracts, and concessions to land (Crouch 1996: 26). It was not uncommon for UMNO representatives to “compete” for government contracts, and UMNO politicians had special access to governmental land grants (Crouch 1996: 39). This blurring of state and UMNO business interests resulted in the increasing dominance of UMNO in the Malaysian economy and gave rise to what is called, in the Malaysian context, “money politics,” which primarily benefits the Malay bumiputra community (Shamsul 1989: 8). The same phenomenon of “consciously employ[ing] the ideology of the New Economic Policy to . . . create a group of rich Muslim businessmen who would then . . . underwrite political leaders, factions and parties” has also been observed in Sarawak and results in a vicious cycle of “timber politics,” where business, politics, and ethnicity are tied together to exploit the timber resources in a powerful constellation of mutual interests (Kaur 1998: 138).6 The bumiputra community in peninsular Malaysia and that in east Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) have very different views of the bumiputra policy, based on the cultural and economic differences between the two regions. Malay-Muslims dominate the bumiputra community in peninsular Malaysia (with the exception of the small and marginalized group of non-Muslims, the Orang Asli). Conversely, in east Malaysia, the majority of the bumiputra community is non-Muslim. Furthermore, the majority of the Malays in peninsular Malaysia were peasants at the time of independence from Britain. But the bumiputra of east Malaysia are highly heterogeneous: some urbanized, some peasants, and many who are shifting cultivators and hunter-gatherers (Shamsul 1998: 31). As a result, east Malaysia’s bumiputra community often feels in opposition to the Malay bumiputra community.

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In more recent years, the bumiputra policy has been challenged on several fronts within Malaysia. In Sabah, the most significant challenge has occurred as a result of the political movements of non-Muslim bumiputra, who feel that Christianity and native animist religions are not accorded equal status to that of Islam (Shamsul 1998: 25). The Kadazans,7 the ethnic majority in Sabah, began to resent the Malay-Muslim ideological and political domination over Sabahans and the apparent treatment of Kadazans as second-class citizens (Wah 1992: 223). As one Kadazan leader said, The Kadazans consider themselves the true natives of Sabah and claim that they are the definitive people. . . . [Yet] in reality, the Kadazans have found themselves to be subordinated to the Malays and discriminated against in favor of Muslim natives who also claim to be Malays by virtue of their religion. (Kitingan 1984: 236–237, cited in Wah 1992: 245) This political conflict over the national identity of bumiputra sparked the rise of “Kadazan nationalism” and the formation of the Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS), or United Sabah Party, a Kadazan-controlled party that ruled Sabah for nearly a decade between 1985 and 1994. The period in which the following case study of rural development is situated is the era in which UMNO managed politically to “win back” Sabah from PBS control. Yet despite UMNO rule in Sabah, the fire of Kadazan nationalism was still burning during the mid-1990s. This is evident in the following case study and in the ability of PBS to win a large number of parliamentary seats in the 1995 elections (Shamsul 1998: 32).

Hidden meanings behind rural development Some political leaders in Malaysia may be ideologically committed to the notion that the principles of a Malay-Muslim nation and poverty alleviation are in fact linked as normal and universal values. The strength of politicians’ devotion to these ideologies is certainly brought front stage in the “public transcript” (cf. Scott 1990) of the state discourse, which emphasizes that modernity in Malaysia can be achieved without sacrificing Islamic values (Khoo 1995; Mauzy and Milne 1986: 90). Yet, on another level, some officials recognize that development plans are inherently political and that the attention paid to the perceived “natural” link between development and the moral code of Islam is an

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ideological screen, deflecting attention from the political agenda of Malay-Muslim dominance over other ethnic and religious groups. Intellectual leaders in Sabah openly acknowledge a connection between the development initiatives and the proliferation of the state’s representation of nationalism and modernity. One Sabahan scholar told me, “Kemas and the ministry of rural development use development as an entry point into local villages for politicians. It is all about using development to get votes.” Many Malaysians see that the material rewards that come from development, no matter how feeble they might be, are the gifts that the state provides in return for voter loyalty. Securing votes through development promises is a technology of rule in the Foucauldian conception of power and governmentality. Although some of the state’s policies for getting votes are far more coercive, such as providing illegal immigrants with working papers and a Malaysian identity card in exchange for votes (Chua 1995), rural development projects are presented as serving the “national interest”; they are not coerced but are contingent on local compliance. Although villagers always have the “power to” vote against the Malay-Muslim politicians, the minister of rural development has the “power to” withdraw governmental support. And in fact the UMNO party did just that in 1995 in the village of Govuton8 when the villagers supported the PBS party in the last elections. In 1996, no funds for development projects were forthcoming for these villagers.

The arrival of “modernity” Early in April 1996, the head of the regional UMNO office, Datuk Sukarti, arrived in the rural village of Tempulong accompanied by a dozen women each wearing a colorful silk baju kurung (a long Muslim blouse and skirt) and kerudung (loose Muslim head covering). These women lived in the district center of Ranau, about 12 kilometers from Tempulong. Since the majority of the Tempulong residents follow the religion of the Borneo Evangelical Mission (Sidang Injil Borneo) and make their living as farmers, these women in their Muslim dress stood out as exotic and cosmopolitan. As Desai (Chapter 8, this volume) observes in India, there is often a direct link between the status symbol of clothes and the level of authority expected in particular encounters. These Muslim women belonged to Kemas, the arm of UMNO concerned with converting people to Islam and promoting loyalty to Malay nationalism. To the villagers in Tempulong, they represent a

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very different lifestyle. This point was brought home when one Muslim woman ran from a free-ranging cow, shrieking, “Put him in his stable!” A woman from Tempulong replied, “Where does she think we have a stable?” This incident started a discussion about some of the villagers who had left for work in peninsular Malaysia. When they returned, I was told, their accents had changed and they pretended to forget local place names. This desire to create a distance between village life and “modern” life suggests that both rural Malaysians and the ruling Malay-Muslims are struggling with their similar ethnic histories as they find their place in the hierarchy topped by Malay-Muslim bumiputra. At the same time, such reshaping of self-representation also facilitates cultural mobility as individuals strive to adapt to the dominant national ideal of modernization (see Desai, Chapter 8, this volume). Datuk Sukarti and the Kemas group had come to Tempulong at the invitation of Sindeh, the chairman of the Authority for Village Development and Protection (Jawatankuasa Kemajuan dan Keselamatan Kampung, or JKKK). In local-level politics, the chairman of the JKKK is a political appointment, and therefore individuals associated with the UMNO party control the office of the JKKK. Government aid is directly channeled to the village as a whole, or to the very poor, through the chairman of the JKKK. In reality, the chairman often appropriates a healthy amount of this money for personal use (for a discussion of this trend elsewhere in Malaysia, see Crouch 1992: 28; Shamsul 1989; Scott 1985: 220–231). Local gossip accused Sindeh of using his political appointment for personal aggrandizement and material gain. For instance, Sindeh received money from the UMNO, which he was supposed to allocate to four families to help them improve their homes. He used two of these four allotments for his own home, including a new office for himself. He therefore benefited not only materially from Datuk Sukarti’s visit, but also symbolically since his association with a regional UMNO official and his access to development funds would increase his prestige and authority in Tempulong. Simultaneously, Sindeh’s material rewards institutionalized his patronage to UMNO. This demonstration of political strength was important to Sindeh because the headman in Tempulong, Gani, constantly challenged his local authority. Datuk Sukarti, the regional head of UMNO, launched GDW in Tempulong with an inspirational speech. He described another village, supported by GDW, deep in the interior of Sabah: People in the village were encouraged to clean up their litter and to plant ornamental flowers around their houses.

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The goal was to beautify the village. The Kemas group taught women how to cook spicy, flavorful food. When the men came home from the fields, they would find the children quietly doing their schoolwork. The smell of blossoming flowers would mix with the smell of good food. The beautiful and calming images would pacify any domestic problems. Even if the wives had no sugar for the coffee, the husbands would not be mad because the home was so beautiful. In this village everyone was so inspired that they would meet at dawn before going to the fields and sing the national anthem.9 With the help of money from GDW, he concluded, Tempulong could be as beautiful, peaceful, and modern as the village he had just described. Datuk Sukarti’s speech suggested that Tempulong was the opposite of a modern village, and in fact one of the early initiatives of the GDW in Tempulong—the removal of cow manure from the roadside—supports this view. By placing the emphasis on the aesthetic nature of village life and prioritizing beautiful, well-kept landscaping,10 Datuk Sukarti, and by extension the state’s development initiative, deflected attention from other realities in Tempulong, such as severe shortages of both arable land and wage labor and insecure property rights to agricultural lands. With the focus on more neutral, technical, or, in this case, aesthetic problems, it becomes easier to overlook more complex social and political problems. No one ever raised the notion that a basic restructuring of regional politicaleconomic inequities might be warranted.11 Village beautification is, in fact, a dominant theme in the GDW programs throughout Malaysia. State and federal competitions are held for the prize of “Cleanest, Most Beautiful and Progressive” village. According to the women from the village that won the award in 1997, “There had been very little progress here . . . [so we] decided that it was time we mobilized a gotong royong [cooperative work group] and cleaned things up” (Visvanathan 1997). This national award suggests that villages must first and foremost be clean and orderly, and then the rewards of modernity will fall into place. How cleanliness, orderliness, and discipline are part of a natural progression toward the goals of Wawasan 2020 (i.e., achieving a standard of living similar to Europe) is never questioned. Villagers in Tempulong were confused by Datuk Sukarti’s talk. As state officials present themselves as the keepers of “knowledge” of modernity, marginal people struggle to make that knowledge fit with

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their visions of progress and prosperity. Was Datuk Sukarti’s representation of village life in fact a modern and progressive one? It was incomprehensible to these villagers that any group of adults would gather to sing the national anthem before work. “Who would feed the children and get them ready for school?” Rumihin, a young mother, asked. Another woman queried, “Are they making fun of us?” One does wonder what the government officials do think of rural people when the article about the village that won the “Cleanest, Most Beautiful and Most Progressive” designation refers to the population as “simple but exceedingly warm-hearted and hospitable” (Visvanathan 1997). A sample of national headlines indicates that the government does perceive that the rural population is in need of a strong (and, of course, modern) hand to help them change their “culture and attitude” to be more progressive: “Start adopting modern technology, PM advises farmers” (News Straits Times 1996); “Government agencies plan vital role in changing values” (Mokhtar 1994); “Toward a better life for villagers” (Idrus 1998); “Rural dwellers must adopt competitive attitude” (Bernama Daily News 2000); and “Changing the mindset of the rural population” (New Straits Times 2003). All these headlines suggest that rural villagers somehow have an inappropriate “mindset” and governmental intervention is necessary in order to modify their “mindset” and lead them to accept change according to GDW criteria of modernity. It has been noted elsewhere (e.g., Rossi, Chapter 2, this volume) that changing villagers’ mindset is part of the process aimed at making subjects of development willing to accept change and conform with mainstream, national images of modernity.

Brokers of development Approximately thirty people, about 25 percent of the adult village population in Tempulong, attended Datuk Sukarti’s speech. At least one of those, Rineh, was paid to be there. Rineh is the sister-in-law of Sindeh (the chairman of the JKKK) and a single mother with five children. Unable to plant a swidden field without help from an adult male, she tries to find casual wage labor nearly every day in order to earn cash. On this particular day, she was scheduled to clean out debris from the Montokuon River for $10. Since this work was funded by UMNO, Sindeh was responsible for paying her (and others) for a day of work. Rineh told me that she needed the money, but that Sindeh wanted her at the meeting, so they agreed she would be paid anyway. Apparently, Sindeh was willing to pay people to attend the meeting in order to

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create the illusion that he had village support of his leadership. In fact, Sindeh did have reason to worry that people might not show up, for in the past, the headman of Tempulong, Gani, had been accused of encouraging villagers not to attend village meetings that were sponsored by either Sindeh or the UMNO. By inviting Datuk Sukarti and GDW, Sindeh was creating an opening for the “Malayization” and “Islamization” (through the involvement of Kemas and the UMNO) of Tempulong. Notably absent from the meeting were Gani, the headman, and Tarajun, the former chairman of the JKKK. Both these men objected to the presence of Datuk Sukarti and the GDW project. Gani—an elderly man who staunchly believed in the importance of traditional adat (customs) and the value of their historically proven land use strategies—saw no need for rural development. Gani was not only the headman of Tempulong but also the bobohizan or priest for the traditional animist religion. He objected to the increasing power of the Muslims in Sabah because it diminished his influence over village matters. As headman and bobohizan, it was his responsibility to resolve village disputes following local adat. But the tenets of both the Muslim religion and the Borneo Evangelical Mission often conflicted with local adat. The more villagers turned to the Muslim and Christian faiths and their religious leaders for advice, the less they followed Gani’s leadership. Tarajun, who served as the chairman of the JKKK in Tempulong when the PBS (the Kadazan-led opposition party to UMNO) governed Sabah, also objected to GDW, although for different reasons. Tarajun felt that Sindeh was deeply involved in “money politics”12 and was not a scrupulous leader. Tarajun refused to attend the meeting because he did not want to “be involved with political people.” “There is a time for campaigning and a time for development,” he said, “but you should not mix the two. It only confuses people.” Although Tarajun is no longer the JKKK chairman, he still holds significant influence in the village. By not attending the meeting, he sent a clear message to the rest of Tempulong that he disagreed with Sindeh’s political motives. What Tarajun was most concerned with was Malay political dominance over Sabah’s ethnic minorities. In the eyes of many Sabahans, an allegiance to UMNO represents a betrayal of Kadazan ethnic identity, since UMNO stresses a unified vision of Malaysia through the ideology of “one language, one culture and one religion” (satu bahasa, satu kebudayaan dan satu agama, see Wah 1992: 230; Anderson 1991, Vandergeest 1996). Evidence that loyalty to UMNO represents a betrayal of local ethnic identity can be found elsewhere in Sabah’s rural villages. For example, in a neighboring village of Govuton the chairman of the JKKK, Masiri,

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resigned his position when the PBS party lost the state elections in 1994. By refusing to accept his position of chairman under the UMNO government, Masiri was in effect refusing to form an alliance with that government. The price of this action was the loss of government subsidies for his village and of a salary for himself. He commented that this was a dark time (zaman gelap) in Sabah, when politics and religion were too closely tied. Fiercely proud of his Kadazan/Dusun identity and his leader (the former chief minister and head of PBS, Datuk Pairin Kitingan), he felt that it was only a matter of time before PBS would regain power in Sabah. Until that time, Masiri counseled villagers to refuse money and development projects from UMNO politicians. The trajectory of GDW in Tempulong was shaped by the power struggles between these different village leaders. Sindeh strategically positioned himself as a consumer and advocate for development, in such a way as to receive as many of the benefits of GDW as possible. However, as we will see later, full village cooperation with the project was compromised by Tarajun and others’ unwillingness to fall in step with the expectations of GDW.

Building shrines to modernity During the months of April and May, some Tempulong residents began to work to fulfill the goals of GDW and prepare their village for the arrival of the federal Minister of Rural Development in June. Several times each week, cooperative work groups, or gotong royong, gathered to clean up the litter and cow manure in the village and plant ornamental flowers around the houses. The state sees these cooperative work groups as the hallmark of citizens’ capacity to engage in collective voluntary labor to make the village a better place (see Li 1999). Of course, cooperative labor is hardly a new sign of modernity: Swidden farmers in Malaysia have worked collectively and voluntarily for centuries as neighbors gather together to clear each other’s plots of land quickly during the dry season. Most people in Tempulong did not engage in the work for GDW willingly. Some, notably those loyal to Gani, who rejected these plans for modernizing Tempulong, refused to show up for any of the work. Others complained that there was too much work to be done in their gardens to waste time on planting flowers. In the end, Sindeh’s extended family and the young adults in the village, who did not have to worry about feeding their own children, completed most of the work.

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The most noticeable part of the work was the construction of a cement sign welcoming people to the village of Tempulong, beneath which was an inspirational slogan made out of river rocks painted white: “Yakin Kami Boleh Kami” (“If we believe [in ourselves] we can [achieve our goals]”). Inspirational phrases such as “Yakin Kami Boleh Kami” are common in the recent history of postcolonial Malaysia. Shamsul (1989: 6) points out that the government introduced a series of “sloganeering and change-awareness campaigns” in the 1970s in what was considered an essential “preconditioning process to achieve modernization.” Next to the village meeting house (balai raya), a small rock fountain was erected. There is a certain irony in these shrines to modern development. Women must carry water and food into the balai raya for the kindergarten school lunch, since there is no running water or cooking facilities there. Yet it was through building these small monuments that the state and its funds for development were made visible to villagers and outsiders passing through. The signs symbolically asserted that Tempulong villagers were no longer “backward”; they have the capacity to reorder their environment in terms of predetermined notions of cleanliness and modernity, under the generous guidance of UMNO. The welcoming signpost, fountain, and white river rocks can be seen in many rural villages in Sabah, and have become the ubiquitous symbols of GDW. These short-term objectives of the development process have been referred to as development “cover crop” (Shamsul 1989: 5)—objectives that in the long term do little to change the quality of life.

The theater of development At the end of June, the federal minister of rural development came to tour the village of Tempulong and inspect its progress as part of GDW. Muslim women from the Kemas group spent the day preparing food and decorations for the celebration. After the food was ready, they prepared to greet the federal minister, as well as Datuk Sukarti and other regional officials. The dignitaries rolled into Tempulong in a fleet of four-wheel-drive vehicles. The women from Kemas greeted the federal minister and then, during his speech, joined the audience, “acting” as the local population. Through this performance, the unsavory characteristics of Tempulong that Datuk Sukarti indirectly referred to months earlier were sanitized by the extra-local Muslim women, who prepared the baloi raya and then represented the “local” people for the federal minister. The entire event appeared as a staged act in which the officials

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and supporters of the federal government played out both roles of state and local, for the benefit of Tempulong villagers. The “play” not only asserted the legitimacy of key political figures as representatives of the leading political party but also modeled for the local population how modern Malaysian citizens should appear and how local people should relate to their leaders. Similar examples of the state using an already “modern” group of citizens to provide guidance for those who do not yet understand the state discourses are also found in Indonesia. Li (1999) found that rather than try and settle the true nomads, resettlement officials looked for potential program recipients who were sufficiently isolated or primitive to meet the program criteria, but not especially difficult cases. This would make the state more likely to succeed, and the nomads, the actual targets of resettlement, to see other resettled people as role models and examples of what modernization should look like (Li 1999). The speeches made inside the baloi raya were unimportant to the villagers in Tempulong. Many watched the speeches from outside the baloi raya; others simply stayed at home. Perhaps local people recognized the inherent theatrical nature of the federal minister’s speeches as well as the importance of state self-representation to marginal people. Or perhaps they knew that they would have little say in the future course of events. This delocalizing of the celebration of GDW, which is supposedly devoted to a “new” paradigm of development that strives for “bottom-up development” and the “active engagement of local people in the planning process” of development (Berita Harian 1996: 2), may seem to some to be external signs of the failure of state-sponsored development. To the contrary, the speeches were important elements of the politics of self-representation in which the UMNO party leaders illustrated the association between UMNO, Islam, and development funds and modeled for the villagers how “modern” Malaysian citizens should appear. Although the activities surrounding the visit of the federal minister were theatrical entertainment to some people in Tempulong, these activities also had a darker side. One young woman said to me with utter disdain in her voice, “There are more Muslims from Ranau here today than people from Tempulong. I do not think much of what is happening. It seems as if the Semenanjung (peninsula) is taking over Tempulong and making it their village. They are telling us what things should be done, but no one is asking us what we need or want.” Underlying this statement is a deep local animosity toward the federal government (which is located on the peninsula), its commitment to shaping a nation led by Malay-Muslim ideologies, and the fact that it appears to be taking over

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the Sabah state government. Although many villagers may be able to express their contempt for Malay-Muslim rule to each other, in the current political and economic climate in Malaysia, where the Internal Securities Act is often used to imprison those who are outspoken in their opposition to the federal government, few feel secure enough to engage in more open forms of resistance or civil action.

Beneficiaries of development The events unfolding during GDW in Tempulong dramatically illustrate several points about the relationship between the state and society in Sabah. First, despite the rhetoric of a “new” paradigm of development that strives for “bottom-up development” and the “active engagement of local people in the planning process” of development (Berita Harian 1996: 2), poverty alleviation, and the empowerment of local people, development projects in Malaysia are an attempt to ensure loyalty to the UMNO-led government. This has wide-ranging implications. It shows that the liberal development rhetoric emphasizing “people first” is susceptible to co-optation by the state for political purposes. Recent development critiques have noted that policies labeled as “people first” have not been successful at modifying development hegemony but rather have provided new ways to advance external interests while concealing the underlying political agenda (Mosse 2004). Second, by focusing on the aesthetics of village life, GDW places a specific value on what a modern village should look like. The political realities of poverty are swept away by this type of development that fails to significantly change the standard of living for rural people or recognize political-economic inequities that underlie land insecurity and poverty. Questions of political and economic reform go ignored. However, since poverty alleviation is not the only goal of development initiatives, the “failure” of programs to raise the standard of living is not necessarily a concern of development planners in Malaysia. Instead, other goals become emphasized, such as how development initiatives can be used to build up a modern citizenry that supports the state’s ideological platform. But just how and to what extent were villagers rendered more governable through GDW? Villagers in Tempulong did not unconditionally welcome GDW. Many questioned and even rejected the value of the program and federal involvement in local issues. Furthermore, that only a small percentage of villagers willingly helped Sindeh prepare Tempulong for the federal

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minister’s visit suggests that many were not convinced that their participation in the project would result in material benefits either for the village as a whole or for themselves individually. Recognizing the political message behind the rhetoric of rural development, Tempulong residents did not fully embrace the UMNO ideology, the Islamic religion, or Malaysian nationalism as a result of GDW. In fact, in some instances, the project even succeeded in fueling antifederalist (or anti-Malay bumiputra) sentiments. Even those who appeared willing to accept the government’s political agenda had ulterior motives, primarily access to resources (cf. Rossi, Chapter 2, this volume). Kimin, a village elder, told me that he had taken UMNO money (bribes) to vote for the UMNO-supported political candidate in the last election. But, he said, “Deep in my heart I will always be a PBS supporter. When I go to vote on election day, who knows which way I vote?”13 Although villagers were aware that the dispersal of development funds was contingent on support for UMNO political parties, they were not only skeptical of the value of government development funds, but they knew how to manipulate the political machinery (cf. Scott 1985). This manipulation, however, did not go so far as to significantly change the direction of the development project to the betterment of local livelihoods following their own visions of progress. Thus, the state’s success in expanding its ideological reach to Tempulong was fragile. As Tania Li points out, hegemony cannot be imposed but is worked out through “a terrain of struggle” enacted at the interface of state and society (1999: 316). Although GDW did not fully succeed in promoting the state’s discursive agenda, legitimizing the state, or de-legitimizing the status quo, it did succeed in reproducing the UMNO party’s self-representation to the village level. The federal minister ended his visit with the promise of federal housing funds for several families in Tempulong. By procuring these development funds for the village, Sindeh strengthened his political base at the local level, no matter how fragile or fleeting. Importantly, UMNO leaders did secure the loyalty of Sindeh. With Sindeh in charge of local development funds, a position that he had abused in the past for personal gain, they made sure that he would continue to promote the UMNO-led government’s ideological and political agenda. As a broker of development funds, negotiating money for the village (and himself), Sindeh appears to be one of the more self-motivated and savvy players in the cultural work that takes place between development projects and those they target (Li 1999: 296). Although the cultural and political hegemony of the Malay-Muslim ideology is ever present, it is also weak; and the state’s rationality cannot be fully imposed on the local level. What

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we see then is a fragile reproducing of social and political boundaries through the work of GDW, with a continuous back stage, or “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990), of local resistance to the state’s representation of modernity. At the federal level, the push for modernizing through GDW remains strong into the twenty-first century, although, or perhaps even because, the model has not been successful at achieving its goals. In newspaper articles from 2000 through 2003 these statistics were repeatedly quoted: Only 462 villages (15 percent) of those involved in GDW have shown vast improvement. A total of 1,066 (35 percent) have shown moderate improvement, whereas the remaining 1,461 (48 percent) have shown no improvement (Bernama Daily Malaysian News 2000; New Straits Times 2001; Bernama Daily Malaysian News 2002; New Straits Times. 2003). The articles did not suggest that the model for development was flawed and needed reconsidering. Instead, the rural people were consistently pointed out as the obstacles to success. The Minister of Rural Development, Azmi, argued that rural people are “not self-reliant” and “lack a competitive spirit,” characteristics that will “eventually destroy the community” (Bernama Daily Malaysian News 2000). In order to make GDW more successful, a new set of service-oriented programs would be launched “aimed at changing the mindset of villagers” (New Straits Times 2003). Implicit in these comments is the notion that the government is doing all that it can to modernize and improve rural people’s lives, but it is the rural people who lack the initiative to follow through with government programs. This is not surprising; according to Ferguson (1994), failures in development strategies are generally interpreted as evidence that more resources and more effort is needed to overcome the problems of backwardness. And supporting the state’s assumptions about the weak mindset of rural people, two of Sabah’s leading economists seem at least partially to believe that marginal people are responsible for their place in the national hierarchy. Writing on the causes of poverty in Sabah, they uncritically state that one theory of poverty argues that “poverty results from some limitations, maladjustments, and shortcomings of individuals” and that the “attitudes of the community could be one of the main contributions to poverty.” Another theory that they put forward is that “the poor often display clear symptoms of dependence, helplessness, prejudice and have an unscientific attitude towards life” (Tangau and Tanakinjal 2000: 216). In the logic of state rule, longer and more focused state interventions into local livelihood strategies are called for in order to bring order to the “primitive chaos.”

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What does this case study of development in Malaysia say about development discourse more broadly? As Mosse and Lewis have stated in the introduction to this volume, this analysis has attempted to reaffirm the value of noninstrumental, nonnormative research by paying close attention to the social processes and cultural work that occurs in the daily interactions between the recipients and advocates of development. In Tempulong, despite the complex motivations and social processes, GDW preserved a particular administrative order and reproduced relationships of patronage between local leaders and the ruling party. Development functioned to mobilize and maintain political support for a particular governmental rationality (cf. Mosse 2004). But through a close examination of the differently positioned actors within Tempulong, and the messy power struggles that are hidden to a casual observer, this analysis highlights the fractures within a village appearing to conform to state representations of marginal people. These places of contention and compromise around GDW are the very places that hold promise for either facilitating or derailing future development engagements in Sabah. Throwing light to these social processes could provide a fruitful roadmap for development planners interested in incorporating advice from anthropological critiques of development into their plans.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published in Doolittle (2001). New data has been added here, and the analysis has been pushed to a finer grain through the insightful comments of David Mosse and David Lewis. 2. The processes of Malayization and Islamization described here could be seen as one of the multiple and unique forms in which modernization can appear in a local setting (cf. Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003). Mahathir promotes this view, arguing that Asian nations need to remain committed to “Asian values” and not fall victim to the culturally decadent, amoral, and destructive values promoted by “the West” (Weiss and Hassan 2003: 10). However from the position of the recipients of development, the proliferation of Malay-Muslim ideology is not the local, village cultural work aimed at shaping development to fit local needs and self-representations. Rather, it is a form of national ideological domination over marginal people.

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3. According to Wah (1992: 228 n.4), “[t]here is no cultural group that identifies itself as ‘Malay-Muslim.’ However, such a category is used increasingly in official, media and academic discourse to refer to the non-Kadazan, non-Murut indigenous ethnic groups [in Sabah] who are Muslim and who closely identify themselves with Peninsular Malays, who are usually Muslim as well.” 4. Shamsul has alleged that Kemas goes so far as to gather communitylevel intelligence for UMNO (1986: 187 n.36; 1989: 13). 5. See Ferguson (1994), especially Chapter 9. 6. For an alternative analysis of the timber politics in Sarawak, see Majid Cooke (1997). 7. The term Kadazan has a contested history; see Luping (1994: 103–104). 8. Village and individuals’ names are pseudonyms. 9. Excerpt from field notes, April 15, 1996. 10. See Scott (1998: 224–225) for more on the aesthetic dimension found in some development initiatives. 11. For a similar analysis of how development projects in Malaysia avoid confronting the real problems of marginalized people, see Ibrahim (1995). 12. Tarajun’s concern that Sindeh was involved in “money politics” was a constant undercurrent in all village matters with which Sindeh was associated. 13. Buying votes has a long history in Malaysia, but this practice rose to unprecedented levels in the 1994 elections in Sabah. It is common knowledge that the UMNO party gave hundreds of thousands of dollars away to win favor among voters. Fraudulent identity cards were given to illegal immigrants in exchange for their UMNO support. Despite this, PBS still won the popular election (Khoo 1995; Luping 1994).

References Agrawal, A., and K. Sivaramakrishnan. 2000. Agrarian environments: Resources, representations, and rule in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Berita Harian. 1996. Gerakan desa wawasan: Ke arah transformasi kedua luar bandar, July 4, 1996. Kuala Lumpur.

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Bernama Daily Malaysian News. 2000. Rural dwellers must adopt competitive attitude, says Azmi. Online document, June 11. Bernama Daily Malaysian News. 2002. Half of villages in GDW program fail to achieve objective. Online document, September 11. Case, W. 1995. Malaysia: Aspects and audiences of legitimacy. In Political legitimacy in Southeast Asia, edited by M. Alagappa, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 69–107. Chua, H.A.M. 1995. YB for sale. Kota Kinabalu: Zamantara. Crouch, H. 1992. Authoritarian trends, the UMNO split and the limits to state power. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, edited by J. Kahn and F. Wah, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 21–43. Crouch, H. 1996. Government and society in Malaysia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dentan, R., K. Endicott, A. Gomes, and M. Hooker. 1997. Malaysia and the “original people”: A case study of the impact of development on indigenous peoples. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Doolittle, A.A. 2001. “Are they making fun of us?”: The politics of development in Sabah, Malaysia. Moussons: Social Science Research on Southeast Asia 4:75–95. Ferguson, J. 1994. The anti-politics machine: Development, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ibrahim, Z. 1995. Regional development in Rural Malaysia and the “Tribal Question.” Occasional Paper No. 28. University of Hull, Centre for South-East Asian Studies. Idrus, R. 1998. Towards a better life for villagers. The New Straits Times. Online document, August 10. Jayasankaran, S., and M. Heibert. 1997. Malaysian dilemmas. Far Eastern Economic Review. Online document, September 4. Kaur, A. 1998. A history of forestry in Sarawak. Modern Asian Studies 32(l.1):117–147. Khoo, Boo Teik. 1995. Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An intellectual biography of Mahathir Mohamad. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Kitingan, J. 1984. Political stability and economic development in Malaysia, Ph.D. thesis, Tufts University. Li, T. 1999. Compromising power: Development, culture, and rule in. Cultural Anthropology 14(3):295–322. Luping, H. 1994. Sabah’s dilemma: A political history of Sabah (1960–1994). Kuala Lumpur: Magnus Books.

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Majid Cooke, F. 1997. The politics of “sustainability” in Sarawak. Journal of Contemporary Asia 27(2):217–241. Majid Cooke, F. 1999. The challenge of sustainable forests: Forest resource policy in Malaysia, 1970–1995. Honolulu: Allen & Unwin. Majid Cooke, F. 2002. Vulnerability, control and oil palm in Sarawak: Globalization and a new era? Development and Change 33(2):189–211. Mauzy, D., and R.S. Milne. 1986. The Mahathir administration: Discipline through Islam. In Readings in Malaysian politics, edited by B. Gale. Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk. Mokhtar, N.A. 1994. Government agencies play vital role in changing values. Business Times. Mosse, D. 2004. Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on ethnography of aid policy and aid. Development and Change 35(4):639–671. New Straits Times. 2001. Community involvement in plan “still lacking.” New Straits Times. 2003. Changing the mindset of rural populations. Online document, February 25. Ong, A. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, J. 1985. Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J. 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shamsul, A.B. 1986. From British rule to Bumiputra rule: Local politics and rural development in Peninsular Malaysia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Shamsul, A.B. 1989. Village: The imposed social construct in Malaysia’s developmental initiatives. Working Paper No. 115. University of Bielefeld, Faculty of Sociology, Sociology of Development Research Centre. Shamsul, A.B. 1998. Debating about identity in Malaysia: A discourse analysis. In Cultural contestations: Mediating identities in a changing Malaysian society, edited by Z. Ibrahim, London: ASEAN Academic Press, pp. 17–50. Sivaramakrishnan, K., and A. Agrawal. 2003. Regional modernities in stories and practices of development. In Regional modernities: The cultural politics of development in India, edited by K. Sivaramakrishnan and A. Agrawal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; and Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–62.

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Skaria, A. 2000. Cathecting the natural. In Agrarian environments: Resources, representations, and rule in India, edited by A. Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 265–276. Tangau, W., and G. Tanakinjal. 2000. Poverty and rural development: Prospect and challenges beyond the year 2000. In Sabah and beyond 2000: Development challenges and the way forward, edited by Mohd.Yaakub Hj. Johari and B. Kurus. Kota Kinabalu, Sabah: Percetakan Tedasjaya Sendriian Berhad, pp. 203–227. Vandergeest, P. 1996. Real villages: National narratives of rural development. In Creating the countryside: The politics of rural and environmental discourse, edited by E.M. DuPuis and P. Vandergeest. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 279–302. Visvanathan, T. 1997. Proud moment for most beautiful village in Malaysia. The New Straits Times. Online document, October 11. Wah, F. 1992. Modernization, cultural revival and counter-hegemony: The Kadazans of Sabah in the 1980s. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, edited by J. Kahn and F. Wah, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 225–251. Watts, M. 2003. Development and governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(1):6–34. Weiss, M., and S. Hassan. 2003. Social movements in Malaysia: From moral communities to NGOs. London: Routledge.

FOUR GOVERNING LAND, TRANSLATING RIGHTS

The Rural Land Plan in Benin

Pierre-Yves Le Meur Benin’s Rural Land Plan (PFR, Plan Foncier Rural) takes the form of a simple and relatively cheap—at least compared to classical land titling—form of customary survey.1 It records and maps the totality of customary land rights at the village level through a systematic public inquiry process and produces public documentation by building consensus around land rights holders, land property rights, and field boundaries. A pilot project, the underlying purpose of the PFR is to give legal status to customary rights, but the precise form this takes will depend on how the PFR is eventually integrated into Benin’s ongoing reform of national land legislation. The PFR approach claims to be politically neutral, allowing all stakeholders to define their own property rights and field boundaries, and it is formally limited to a registration function only. But in practice, the PFR combines at least five different objectives, often ambiguously. It sets out (1) to overcome the inefficiency of postcolonial land laws that had previously excluded the customary domain, (2) to secure rural producers’ land rights, (3) to solve land conflicts, (4) to promote rural development and act as an incentive for productive investments, and (5) to serve as a tool for land development and natural resources management (gestion de terroir) (CELCOR/PGTRN 2000: 7).2 The PFR in Benin is in practice a complex form of development intervention that links law and knowledge (Geertz 1983). This awkward relationship is the focus of this chapter.

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Knowing and ordering land tenure PFR can be seen as a force field, an arena of confrontation and negotiation between social actors. A micropolitics of development helps us to focus on the processes of reinterpretation, selective appropriation, and dismembering of a development intervention as a set of material and symbolic resources. Here I follow the work of Cohen and Comaroff, which emphasizes the extent to which political actions are underpinned by struggles around the “management of meanings” and pleads for a “more obviously cognitive emphasis in political analysis” (1976: 87). PFR is inherently a chain of knowledge production and recognition about land rights, combining expertise distribution, people’s participation, and applied science (Lenclud 1995; Sillitoe 1998) through specific mechanisms of translation that shape and structure the whole project. I use here Latour’s and Callon’s notion of translation (Callon 1986; Latour 1995) as a political process, in the sense of transforming the world we live in through procedures of extraction/inscription or successive de- and recontextualizations. Michel Callon has highlighted four steps in the translation process: problematization, interessment, enrollment, and mobilization (1986: 181–199). Callon and his colleagues (2001: 73–104) split scientific labor up into three elementary translations. The first is the reduction of the “big world” (macrocosm) into the “small world” of the laboratory (microcosm). The second relates to the “research collective” of researchers and instruments that explores the product of the first translation and deciphers and produces “inscriptions” of its reality. Third, the objectified but “hyper-localized” entity generated by the two first phases must then be transported back into the “big world,” a costly and labor-intensive task that involves its conversion into an object able to raise interest on the part of potential allies. Achieving this third translation successfully implies that the macrocosm must be endowed with characteristics of the laboratory at strategic points, what Callon and others (2001: 98–100) call “the laboratorisation of the world.” The result is the reconfiguring of the macrocosm from state A to state B. As suggested by the sociology of translation, in order to transform the world we live in, we must first render it able to be manipulated. In our case, there is no laboratory of social sciences producing an ethnography of land rights to be translated into the “big world,” but the idea of the “‘pilot project,” with the “aesthetics of miniaturisation” it conveys (Scott 1998: 257–261), closely resembles it. The notion of enrollment and mobilization is relevant too in this context, especially as regards the

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“making and marketing of participation” (Mosse 2003) within the procedure of rights identification and codification. The politics of participation, enrollment, and alliance lie at the heart of the PFR, in apparent contradiction to its supporters’ positivistic stance. We know from Foucault that knowledge and power are intertwined. Participation within the PFR plays a key role in connecting knowledge and power, since it helps convey a neutralist and positivist view of project processes. The PFR is a way of disciplining and making legible (Scott 1998) customary land use and land rights. The codification of custom is nothing new, of course. PFR belongs to a long-standing tradition that is part and parcel of the colonial past (Schapera 1938, Spear 2003, for eastern and southern Africa; Sivaramakrishnan 1999, for India) and constitutive of Western countries’ legal history (Vincent 1990; AssierAndrieu 2001). As Sivaramakrishnan asserts in eastern India, “the work of surveying was to discover and to order” (1999: 80). The PFR as a form of “customary survey” is a way of knowing and ordering reality and of discovering and recognizing local land rights. How does this work “on the ground”? The PFR is not simply a way of knowing reality, a kind of “applied ethnography of customary rights,” that results in a recognition of what exists. The process of recognizing rights transforms their very nature by extracting them from local practices, uses, and authorities via a process of “externalization” (Chauveau 2003), a form of translation that both decontextualizes and recontextualizes knowledge and practice. The PFR is unable to take account of land tenure complexities and tends to produce a set of simplified artifacts through the action of its homogenizing procedures.3 These tensions—knowing/acknowledging, observing/acting upon, describing/simplifying, understanding/disciplining—constitute PFR as a development intervention in the legal field. They do not exist per se but result from, and are embodied (and unevenly distributed) in, actors’ practices, discourses, and representations. In this respect, knowledge itself must be recognized for its processual nature and conceived of as a “set of practices” (Desai, Chapter 8, this volume). To deal with this issue, I first focus on the dimensions (inherent in the field of development) of interpretation, selective appropriation, and adjustment. Then I shift the focus to knowledge production/recognition as constitutive of the Rural Land Plan as a “chain of translations.” Both sides are inherently linked to each other and constitute PFR as a modality of governmentality,4 a set of disciplines in the sense of the situated and dynamic combination of “technical capacities, the games of communication, and the relationships of power” (Foucault 1983: 219; see also Foucault 1975)5. I will come

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back to this point in the conclusion—that is, to the question of government as “a mode of action upon the actions of others” (Foucault 1983: 221), or, in our case, as a way of structuring the reality and the understanding of land rights and community boundaries.

Development, knowledge, and land tenure It is now commonplace to see development intervention as a social interface: a complex set of resources, services, representations, and power positions strategically manipulated by various social actors within local and supralocal arenas (see, e.g., Elwert and Bierschenk 1988; Long 1989). Development anthropology has also focused on local or indigenous knowledge and on how development uses and produces both knowledge and ignorance (Hobart 1993; Jacob 2000; Sillitoe et al. 2002). This unbalanced confrontation results in shifting frontiers of legitimate (useful and visible, thus usable) knowledge, often at the expense of local forms of knowledge. Recent publications emphasize the intricacy between so-called local knowledge, science, and development apparatus. Departing from earlier conceptions too narrowly centered on technical (often agricultural and ecological) knowledge, they assume that “local knowledge needs to be understood in the broadest terms to encompass not only people’s understandings of the social universes they inhabit, but also of their rights” (Pottier 2003: 4). As a development intervention, PFR is primarily an institutional technology, a “solution in search of a problem” (Naudet 1999). It is also a public policy project implicitly underpinned by a social theory, and thus a mode of thinking and ordering reality. This chapter sketches out a brief institutional history of PFR before describing its inherent contradictions, and finally it explains the details of its implementation.

The context: institutional technology transfer The institutional technology of PFR was crafted by the French Development Agency (AFD)6 and first implemented in Côte d’Ivoire in the late 1980s (Bosc et al. 1996)7. The technique was later (in the early 1990s) exported to other French-speaking west African countries (Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Benin, the case under study here8) and thus locally reshaped by the different national and local contexts and actors of its implementation. The PFR began as a kind of technology transfer operated by AFD in the context of Benin’s 1989–

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1991 democratic transition. It forms part of a natural resource management project (PGRN) funded by World Bank/IDA (International Development Association) (58 percent), GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit) (21 percent), AFD (9 percent), UNDP (3 percent), and the government of Benin (9 percent) and prepared in 1990–1992. Its objectives were, first, institutional strengthening (including the elaboration of new legal framework and public policy and the reinforcement of planning and monitoring capacities) and, second, the identification and implementation of pilot schemes in natural resources management and environment protection (World Bank 1992: 12). In the longer term, the plan was to integrate the project into national planning and legal change. Land operations were listed in official documentation (World Bank 1992: 12) as a subsection of watershed development, which was a PGRN structuring activity. Although sites were selected according to representative criteria as regards land tenure, cotton growing areas were ignored (notwithstanding the fact that cotton ranks first in Benin’s exports),9 as were the zones of 1950–1970s large-scale development schemes (oil palm and irrigation), where land access is a highly sensitive issue (Le Meur 1995). Actually, land issues were of secondary importance in a project underlain by environmental concerns. A second important aspect of PFR’s institutional history was the conflict between the development agencies involved—World Bank, French AFD, and German GTZ. The PFR was clearly the AFD’s project, and it relied on AFD financial support. Eventually, the World Bank left the PGRN, and in 1998–1999 PGRN evolved into the PGTRN (with the “T” standing for Terroir). This was a far from smooth transition, and PFR procedures were reappraised, as will be discussed later. PGTRN officially started in January 2000, funded for four years by AFD and GTZ and structured around two main axes: (1) natural resource management and gestion des terroirs, and (2) land operations (PFR). The program functions under the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fishery (MAEP) and is coordinated by the ministry agency CELCOR (cellule de coordination), with national NGOs and private development agencies in charge of project implementation at the site level. The changes raised issues of coordination between actors as well as the question of land tenure as an autonomous object of intervention (see later discussion).10 From its inception, PGRN (and later PGTRN; see CIRAD-TERA et al. 1998: 67) was seen as a tool for producing or accompanying legal change with regard to land, and the reform process was launched in 1999. Without going into the details,11 it is worth mentioning here that future rural

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land law drafts refer to the issuing of a formal land certificate by PFR and include plans for the procedure to be extended “on demand” to the whole country. The sudden scaling up of what was until then a pilot project raised some specific problems. In September 2002, PFR had covered forty-one villages and 53,304 hectares, but in practice operations had been completed in only thirteen villages, representing 18,247 hectares. Operations were restricted to the six sites of Allada (Atlantique department), Aplahoué (Couffo), Boukombé (Atacora), Ouaké (Donga), Ouessè (Collines), and Sinendé (Borgou). Scaling up from a pilot project to the national level is not merely a question of quantitative change. The way back to the macrocosm—to follow Callon’s terminology—is made up of strategic negotiations and alliance building.12 It will require a fundamental change of nature for PFR since, unlike the future land law, the pilot phase is not yet embedded in a specific legal framework.

Contradictions of procedure PFR is structured in a linear technical form with a five-stage series of successive operations, from stimulating local demand to production of a final product (Hounkpodoté 2000: 228), as follows: 1. An awareness-raising campaign to secure the written consent of the local population. 2. Socioeconomic studies using participatory methods to collect relevant community-level information on economic, demographic, and social dynamics. 3. A diagnostic exercise designed to understand local stakeholder land strategies. 4. A field survey and census, carried out in public, which generates a list of all rights holders and a cadastral map. These are submitted for public display locally for three months in order to register any competing claims. 5. The finalization of documents and the implementation of land management commissions (CVG/PFR) to manage the PFR at village level. The goal of the PFR was to provide a comprehensive picture of all land rights, whatever their nature and origin (and beyond solely “customary rights”) as recognized by their holders and the wider community (CELCOR/PGTRN 2000: 8). The underlying philosophy is thus participatory and neutralist. The fourth survey phase lies at the heart of

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the enterprise, but it is far from neutral, since actors meet and negotiate according to their own interests, resources, and perceptions. This forms a basic contradiction within PFR that must be managed. PFR staff and implementers form part of this contradiction by acting as interviewers and participant observers, but also by becoming or already being involved in local land politics. A second contradiction involves the system of registration, which is heavily standardized, despite the PFR’s official discourse of comprehensiveness and a nonhierarchical approach to property rights. Rather than using qualitative guidelines that could take into account diverse forms of land tenure, standardized questionnaire forms (with some open spaces for qualitative aspects) were developed. This meant that complex “bundles of rights” (Maine 1861) became boiled down into a binary classification that distinguishes only the “customary owner”— “power decision holder”—and the “other users” (exploitants).13 This reproduces the Western dichotomy between owner and user and departs from current analytical approaches that distinguish operational and administrative rights (Schlager and Ostrom 1992; Le Roy et al. 1996; Colin 2004). The PFR’s overall social acceptability14 is here paradoxically achieved through the process of overall simplification of land arrangements that the PFR’s identification and registration procedures bring about. The second contradiction is therefore that between identifying and registering rights—basically a technical affair—and securing rights holders, which is a political question that requires securing all stakeholders within a “win-win” game. This became more explicit within PGTRN, which, when faced with reluctant landowners, revised its questionnaires (which originally assumed no hierarchy among rights and rights holders) by reintroducing a binary owner/user distinction, thus relinquishing its initial, although illusory, attempt at neutrality.

Contextualizing the situation: PFR interpretations, evolutions, adjustments As a result of these inherent contradictions and ambiguities, the PFR became transformed in the course of its implementation.15 One set of changes derived from the changing context. The PFR was embedded— in a subordinate position—within a natural resources management project, and this became more pronounced during the second PGTRN phase. A second area of transformation was that of the conscious adaptive changes and improvements made during implementation in

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response to the everyday difficulties experienced by project actors. Some changes, such as the combining of socioeconomic and land data into a single system, resulted from project monitoring workshops (PGRN 1997) and external evaluations (CIRAD-TERA et al. 1998). Other adaptations emerged from field practices as project agents, facing technical or political difficulties, tried to tinker and work out local solutions. For instance, small problem-solving meetings were organized, even though formal project procedure established a strict separation between the investigation and publicity phases. The three-month publicity phase became longer or shorter depending on the levels of conflict and resistance. In some cases, small-scale innovations remained undiscussed. Running “from practice to practice” (Bourdieu 1972), they belong to the broad field of PRF actors’ practical consciousness (Giddens 1984) and interpretations of the official guidelines. Adjustments were closely linked—analytically and in everyday practices—to local understandings and expectations of PFR, which was in reality perceived as a state-led development intervention.16 The execution of the PFR is therefore best viewed as a form of co-production rather than as simple implementation. These aspects of reinterpretation and selective appropriation (Olivier de Sardan 1995: 133–134) can be found at every stage of the project’s procedures. They contribute crucially to the tension that exists between the project’s inherent tendency toward standardization and its positivist neutral stance, which is aimed at fully capturing a heterogeneous reality. The following examples illustrate this tension and, by the same token, show how PFR as an institution17 copes with it: Diagnostic. Across the two project phases, a striking diversity among diagnostic reports can be observed, ranging from standardized applications of RRA/PRA (rapid rural appraisal/participatory rural appraisal) procedures to detailed accounts of local features in land affairs that draw on settlement history, local terminology, and analyses of power holders. Inquiry statements. These have changed over time. Although a formal final statement (procès-verbal) is prepared by rights holders (or “customary owners”) and signed by neighbors, two understandings now coexist within the project: a simple summary of recorded data in survey boxes, and a complementary set of recorded information that does not easily fit in these boxes—such as notes on the historical trajectory of a land plot, the origin of rights relating to it, or the specific modalities of its purchase. The second document

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form may also show discrepancies between local “uses” as practices and as “customs.”18 Village land committees. These were originally conceived of as basic tools for the recording of rights and claims and were implemented just before the PFR “publicity” phase. This reflects the PFR’s positivist bias, which was well internalized by its staff, one of whom remarked, “People decide, PFR does not have to interfere, only to take note.” PGTRN’s decision to shift the foundation of land committees “upward” in the process was therefore an important change. Land committees now play a role in the PFR implementation, inquiry, and publicity phases (CELCOR/PGTRN 2000: 28). They are clearly no longer a “neutral” public forum for the simple validation of recorded rights. Their political nature is recognized, albeit implicitly, since land committee implementation still does not appear as an autonomous step in the PFR procedures manual (CELCOR/PGTRN 2000: 38ff). The committees are instead defined as “participatory structures,” “as representative as possible of all land rights holders and land users,” “resulting from a consultation at village level, supported and conducted by PFR field team leader, and leading to a consensus.” Therefore, according to the project, there is no need for a “unified model” of land management committee (CELCOR/PGTRN 2000: 87–88). Such definitions therefore allow room for different understandings of committees’ composition and functioning to coexist. For project field-workers, this could produce a dilemma: whether to start with the real (taking account of local power structures and “traditional” hierarchies) or whether to attempt to act upon it by promoting a “modernist,” inclusivist viewpoint by co-opting certain excluded categories such as “young people” and “women.” In the cases I investigated, the solution adopted to cope with such contradictions in practice was to abandon the neutralist position and to try to influence the local discussion about the composition committees. Staff noted and sometimes restrained the activities of local power holders seeking to use the committees to further their own interests. Contracts and land transactions registration. Written land contracts were an innovation by PGTRN and were used both as a device for securing land tenure (especially where migrants’ autochthonous land relations were at stake, such as in Ouessè) and for negotiating project measures such as reforestation and resources management.

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The linking of survey and inquiry with the establishment of contracts (on the site of Allada) or overcoming difficulties in an enquiry by brokering contracts between migrants and autochthonous landholders represented further innovations within the innovation. The latter measure significantly departs from PFR’s neutralist politics since it becomes clearly a matter of securing rights, negotiating, and brokering—in short, of acting upon reality, and doing this directly and unmediated by description and knowledge production. Moreover, replacing the PFR survey by contract negotiations implicitly questions the PFR domain of validity. Both the PGTRN agency (CELCOR) and foreign experts have actually avoided the debate. The intermediary report between PGRN and PGTRN came closer to tackling this issue but ultimately drew back from this, remaining on the surface of things and pointing only to areas of possible technical improvement and management command structures (CIRAD-TERA et al. 1998: 31). We have seen so far how PFR agents deal with the everyday difficulties of implementation. I will focus in the next section on the cognitive side of the process—in other words, on how PFR produces knowledge and ignorance about land rights, through a complex process of translation (transcription, codification, recognition).

Producing knowledge and erasing diversity Any development action involves knowledge. In its archetypal form, it basically consists in a transfer of technical knowledge. Softer versions insist on indigenous knowledge, generally linking it to a turn away from top-down approaches toward more participatory conceptions. Bringing indigenous knowledge to development praxis raises many questions about translation, generalization, and usability (without even speaking of its very definition19). In the case of PFR, these dimensions, especially translation, lie at the core of the intervention itself: Knowledge translation is not a means to an end (agricultural productivity, social welfare, sustainable development) but the very objective of the process. PFR is a matter of knowing and recognizing customary land rights by registering and mapping them.

PFR as a chain of translations The Rural Land Plan produces knowledge through the (linear) technical itinerary described earlier. It can be seen too as a set as actors

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fulfilling different functions within the overall process (an institution in the sense of social arena). It is made of state instances (CELCOR, lodged by the Ministry of Agriculture, MAEP); donors’ representatives (AFD, GTZ); private operators (GERAM Conseils in Ouessè) and NGOs in charge of its implementation on the ground (maîtrise d’ouvrage); delegates locally chosen (land management committees); national and foreign experts carrying out diagnostics and evaluations; local agents recruited for land inquiries; and village power holders and “target populations,” namely land holders and land users. Knowledge production and management results from the functioning of communication channels linking (or not) the involved actors. From a diachronic point of view, the transition from PGRN to PGRTN revealed significant disagreements between the funding agencies in relation to discontinuities of knowledge. For example, diagnostic reports in Ouaké were found to have disappeared, and land inquiries in Boukombé were obviously made too hastily in some cases. Institutional memory is an all too often neglected aspect in the development field, where projects are prone to “structural amnesia” (Chauveau 1994). Nonetheless, knowledge gaps also contributed to the betterment of procedures, as well as to a growing social acceptance of the whole intervention at the local level, such as in Boukombé (see Map 4.1). From a synchronic point of view, the internal circulation of knowledge within the project was hampered by actors’ lack of awareness of land issues. Land tenure is a complex set of productive, social, political, and symbolic relationships, which are both fragmented and compartmentalized (Quarles van Ufford 1993) by the project into a series of technical tasks. Little use was made of information generated at other points in the land knowledge production chain. For example, no use was made of land tenure glossaries or diagnostics during the land inquiry, nor were PFR field-workers given training with regard to land issues or local contexts. The mode of production of land lexicons is revealing, since it oscillates between two poles: one that aims to make local categories fit within French terminologies on the basis of a clear-cut equivalency, and the other trying to express in the best way possible the meanings of local categories. If land management committees had been implemented at an earlier stage, these weaknesses may have been overcome. But in practice, training remained primarily technical, without an explicit discussion of arbitration or mediation functions. This was despite the private recognition of the political nature of land issues by project actors.

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Map 4.1

Villages covered by the PFR in Benin. Villages covered by the PFR (R l L d Pl )

Land and natural ressources management project (PGTRN) Republic of Benin NIGER Ministery of Agriculture, livestock and fishery

BURKINA-FASO

&

&

& & &

SINENDE

& &

& & &

BOUKOUMBE

Villages surveyed: 04 Total area covered by PGTRN: 6016 ha

&

&

Average size of the plots: 20 ha

Villages surveyed: 08 Total area covered by PGTRN: 5522 ha Average size of the plots: 5 ha

&

& &

&

&

& &

NIGERIA

&

OUAKE OUAKE

OUESSE

Villages surveyed: 07

OUESSE

Total area covered by PGTRN: 6750 ha Average size of the plots: 46 ha

Villages surveyed: 07

Total area covered by PGTRN: 5899 ha &

& & &

TOGO

Average size of the plots: 11 ha

&

&

&

PGTRN Site Limit of the communes PFR PGRN village & PFR PGTRN village & Total nb of villages covered by PGTRN: 23

APLAHOUE

APLAHOUE

Total area covered by PGTRN: 27620 ha

Villages surveyed: 7 Total area covered by PGTRN: 1679 ha Average size of the plots: 4 ha

& &

&

& & &

&

ALLADA ALLADA

Villages studied: 07

Total area covered by PGTRN: 1754 ha & & &

&& &

Average size of the plots: 4 ha

&

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Source

Daniel TOSSOU / PGTRN 19

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PFR as an institution therefore “encodes information” (Douglas 1987: 47) in an ambivalent way, producing both knowledge and ignorance— or, more accurately amnesia—by defining what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten (Douglas 1987: 69). It then validates these results publicly through the production of official documents (in the forms of maps and rights holders’ listings) and the issuing of certificates (although these are yet to be finalized pending a new rural land law). Furthermore, all these documents (especially the maps) generate a kind of “realist illusion,” a truth effect (see Worby 1994 for a colonial case). Discrepancies in the institutional setting partly explain this dialectic. Ultimately, the whole project purpose cannot be achieved: Taking account, without exclusion, of all types of land rights of individual and collective appropriation or use, whatever their origin: law or other official/administrative document, customary origin, contractual origin (agreement between individuals, formalised or more often informal). (PGTRN 2000: 8) Assier-Andrieu’s anthropological thoughts on law and society can be useful here: “When one ‘recognizes’ a custom or a use, is it a matter of identifying latent norms or of decreeing new rules? Is it the work of an ethnographer or of a legislator?” (1996: 51). Is the Rural Land Plan, then, a matter of knowledge—of description and ethnography of rights—or of legislation, through the construction of recognition procedures? A first answer lies in the mode of PFR’s integration (especially in relation to issued certificates) into the future land law and the recent decentralization processes (Lavigne Delville et al. 2003). Moving beyond understandings of “pragmatic of public policy,” it is also revealing to examine and question the illusory claims to comprehensiveness that underpin the Rural Land Plan.

Describing complexity or making it legible? At first sight, PFR’s objective is to take account of the totality of land rights and land uses at the village level. Although the project does not explicitly aim at simplification and legibility, as we have already seen, a set of microprocesses—partly microprocedures, partly microadjustments—operates to erase diversity in land tenure through the activities of making diagnoses, constructing lexicons,

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and devising survey questionnaires for the inquiry stage. In each locality guidelines are reinterpreted, individual initiatives taken, collective assessments made, and discontinuities created in information flows, which, combined with an overall lack of training, give PFR a distinctive flavor in each locality. Cases of rights ignored or rights holders excluded are commonplace. Sometimes this occurs for a good reason, such as an incompatibility between short-term use rights and the duration of PFR procedures, and sometimes it is the result of superficial implementation of the successive steps. The inquiry process renders some actors, such as “‘herdsmen,” or some details, such as use rights over natural resources, “‘invisible” or leaves them unidentified as a result of poor documentation. The larger the registered field is, the greater the risk of forgetting certain rights holders. Some of these PFR processes nonetheless recognize the political and heterogeneous nature of local dynamics, such as the early implementation of land management committees, the organization of small-scale meetings in the course of the inquiry, or NGO brokerage activities as part of preparation for or as a substitution for land inquiry. In analyzing the way PFR functions, we must therefore avoid representing it simply as a sort of state “plot” systematically aimed at disciplining land and people, since this would overestimate the strength of the state in imposing “its” way of seeing reality. How useful is social theory for expanding our analysis of the land project? Concepts of territory, lineage, ownership and property rights, consensus, and politics are crucial in that respect. Contributing to translating the complexity of “the real” into understandable worlds, social theories can provide the conceptual basis for analyzing how policies aim to craft governable spaces (Rose 1999: 31; see also Callon et al. 2001: 234). PFR is now embedded within a wider natural management resource project as “gestion des terroirs.” The term terroir raises some translation problems in English. Originating from the field of geography, it conflates a territory, a localized group of people (a village), and a basically stabilized farming activity, which may contradict social actors’ effective (de-localized and network-like) action space (Painter et al. 1994). The policy of gestion des terroirs can be interpreted as a new form of villagization, although such a policy no longer functions through the creation of villages around a core of social infrastructures, as had been the case in Tanzania (Scott 1998: 223) and elsewhere in colonial and postcolonial Africa in the 1950s through the 1970s.20 Instead, it begins from the delimitation of a well-defined territory encompassing—producing—a

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locality that manages “its” agricultural lands and natural resources. PFR is part and parcel of this process. This fact, mostly implicit, meets difficulties when facing situations in which settlements are not stabilized and land sovereignties are blurred. Agrarian frontiers (e.g., Ouessè in central Benin) do not easily fit into the terroir concept (Chauveau et al. 2004). Interestingly, the implementing NGO in Ouessè has now given up entering data on these zones, adapting the limits of the terroir by excluding areas where identification of land rights is contentious. A second conceptual trap arises in the form of the lineage, which is seen by the project as a corporate group possessing and managing a well-defined territory. The head of a lineage holds administrative rights over land and resources inside a territory, namely the right to regulate and distribute land use rights (internal management), to exclude/ include claimants (lineage members and outsiders), to extract a rent, and to define how and to whom land rights are to be transferred. But as a “customary owner” (to use PFR’s terminology) and “representative” of its lineage, a lineage head has no right of alienation. The fact that this definition is not questioned by the project21 raises some problems. Certain areas identified by the project as lineage territories (such as Ouaké and Sinendé) prove in practice to be no such thing. They are actually areas of shifting cultivation headed by a “traditional” political authority (gandosunon in Sinende, for instance) who is neither strictly a lineage head nor a land authority holding administrative rights. The internal allocation of use rights functions outside such authorities through a set of flexible, negotiated arrangements. As a Gando elder in Sinende put it, If you [PFR] wish to establish a link between a piece of land and a family, because the latter used to farm the former a few years ago, you will make many mistakes. Circulation through our territory was very free in the past. Each of us has cultivated in different areas, and then abandoned cleared plots. Instead of this approach, I would rather advise you to take note of existing rights. Trying to trace back who is the “real” owner of a piece of land would be difficult to achieve here. In an agrarian frontier area like Ouessè, the notion of lineage territory is absent. Land clearing instead follows other rules in the form of a kind of “gentleman’s agreement” (for instance, not crossing over a neighbor’s

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cleared pathway) that is based on a conception of land as a public good. It also relates to the settlement of migrants who are linked with autochthonous people through clientelistic ties and social obligations and not only through land relations (see Le Meur 2005; Chauveau forthcoming). At the same time, the strategy of neotraditional chiefs seeking to impose a rent (between land rent and neocustomary taxation) does not easily fit into PFR legal theory. It is not formally taken into account by the PFR, although it is now tolerated by the state administration and PGTRN (Le Meur forthcoming). PFR’s neutralist stance makes it difficult for its agents to decipher the politics of land tenure behind the dominant language of property rights.22 When the project registers (as in Ouaké) a political authority as a customary landowner who holds all accumulated administrative rights, except the right to sell land, this profoundly transforms land relations. The project does this without fully realizing the implications of such a change. The combination of the PFR’s participatory ideology and its translation mechanisms functions as a screen between PFRconstructed realities and local land politics, where the embeddedness of rights in complex social relations and political authorities forms the core of land relations and brings about their inherent politicization (Hann 1998; Le Meur 2002a; Lund 2002). This leads us to another unquestioned assumption, about the nature of consensus. Consensus is aimed at through a sequence of project steps that build social demand and acceptance, first during the phase of contradictory inquiry (rights, parcels, rights holder identification) and later during the phase of publicity, underpinned by the idea of constructing a neutral public space where everything would and could be said. Consensus is thus consciously pursued by PFR, but its implicit conception rather revolves around an understanding of consensus as a “structural or functional property of society: shared moral values creating social integration” (Murphy 1990: 24). The idea of “social consensus as a purposive or strategic accomplishment” (Murphy 1990) is restricted to project action, but does not question its reflexive and political dimensions from the perspectives of local actors. This positivistic, nonpolitical view of consensus is closely related to PFR’s participatory ideology and the widespread tendency among development projects to construct bounded domains of intervention. Such projects are thus unable to integrate conceptually and operationally the fact that, for instance, a consensus reached in a project arena is dependent upon conflicts and negotiations that take place in other, nonproject or “backstage” arenas such as political bodies, hometown associations, churches, and so forth.23

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Conclusion: participation, applied knowledge, and land governance PFR is a hybrid set of state and nonstate instances that contribute to a specific form of land governmentality (Foucault 2001). As a development intervention, PFR is a way of acting upon social reality and a means for organizing thought and action24 in the field of customary land rights. The Rural Land Plan becomes a way of knowing and acknowledging, and thus of ordering (in both senses of the word)—of making legible (Scott 1998)—land “customs.” Making rights legible— through inquiry forms, maps, and certificates—implies making them visible too, since it is a way of “describing the hidden,” as Blundo (2003) suggests in relation to the difficulties of studying corruption. Land rights are similarly “hidden,” since they do not have a fixed or clear-cut shape, particularly in the case of informal “customary” land rights. Such rights normally take shape through negotiated processes of claim and recognition, but the PFR instead gives them a “definitive” form. Actually, the whole process of the PFR can be seen in terms of an applied ethnography of rights that is willing to take exhaustive account of the complexity of land rights,25 but that generates flaws and biases in and through the mode of description and the chain of translation such that diversity is erased and categories are homogenized. PFR ideology and practice also functions to produce depoliticization (Ferguson 1994), as for instance, by ignoring the reciprocal and mutually constitutive link between rights and authorities (Lund 2002). The project’s prevailing participatory ideology, variously expressed at different stages of its processes,26 plays a major role in this, since it conflates knowledge and decision making in the form of consensus production and downplays the political processes at work, including the reconfiguring of identities and tendencies toward an ethnicization of land relations.27 Participation involves enrollment, alliance-making, and mobilization and becomes the core of the politics of translation that underpin the Rural Land Plan. Oppositions between knowing and acknowledging, observing and acting, describing and simplifying, and understanding and disciplining are all inherent in the PFR project as it intervenes in the legal field in relation to local knowledge, social theory, interpretative quest, and normative apparatus (Geertz 1983; Assier-Andrieu 1996). What is fascinating here is the way this dense web of meanings and actions remains largely unquestioned in the realm of PFR’s everyday practices, even though contradictions may be perceived by many actors on the ground.

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Anyway, as Gérard Lenclud (1995: 59) reminds us, “the most efficient action is not necessarily the best informed.”

Notes 1. I wish to thank David Lewis, David Mosse, and Jean-Pierre Jacob for stimulating comments on this chapter. 2. CELCOR coordinates PFR implementation under the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fishery. 3. These “homogenizing procedures” expand beyond diagnostics and evaluations (Ferguson 1994) to encompass the whole intervention. 4. Nikolas Rose (1999: 19) distinguishes between governance and governmentality: “despite these similarities, the ethos of analytics of governmentality is very different from that of sociology of governance. First, analyses of governmentalities are empirical but not realist. . . . They are studies of a particular ‘stratum’ of knowing and acting. Of the emergence of particular ‘regimes of truth’ concerning the conduct of conduct, ways of speaking truth, persons authorized to speak truths, ways of enacting truths and the cost of so doing. . . . And their role is diagnostic rather than descriptive: they seek an open and critical relation to strategies for governing, attentive to their presuppositions, their assumptions, their exclusions, their naiveties and their knaveries, their regimes of vision and their spots of blindness.” See Foucault’s definition: “Under governmentality, I understand the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this specific albeit complex form of power, having the population as main target, political economy as principal form of knowledge, and security devices as main technical instrument” (Foucault 2001: 655). As Pels notes, Foucault’s approach raises “the question of the extent to which governmentality itself is synonymous with Western culture as such, whether it can be regarded as a whole, or whether it is a set of technologies that lend themselves to selective adoption into alternative governmentalities” (Pels 1997: 177). See Ferguson and Gupta (2002: 988–991) and Gould (2005) on the Eurocentric bias of the notion of governmentality. 5. Jean-Pierre Jacob (personal communication, 2/2/05) suggests a complementary way of using Foucault’s thought in the study of land governance with the related notion of “bio-power,” centered on the conception of both man and society as biological entities and on

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

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the search for security and control through disciplining practices (Foucault 1976: 177ff). Land tenure security can thus be simultaneously seen as a common and a private good, and PFR as a tool for arbitrating between both dimensions via censuses, maps, and codification procedures. Formerly CCCE (until 1993), then CFD (until 1998). They show that PFR’s origin in Côte d’Ivoire was “the result of a compromise between Ivorian administration and donors’ various expectations” (Bosc et al. 1996: 23). This chapter draws on two empirical sources: (1) an assessment of PFR in four sites (Boukombé, Ouakè, Aplahoué, and Allada) in 2002 (see Edja et al. 2003) and (2) individual fieldwork in Ouessè (see Le Meur, 2002b, 2005, forthcoming; see Le Meur and Adjinacou 1998 on local-level politics in the same locality). Sinendé was added in the second phase in 1998 (CIRAD-TERA et al. 1998: annex 1). PGTRN ended in 2003, and the follow-up project, PROCEGRN, continues the shift toward natural resource management. GRET has a multidisciplinary team made of Beninese and French anthropologists, surveyors, legal sociologists, and lawyers involved in the drafting of the new rural land law (see Lavigne Delville et al. 2003). Courts of justice, for instance, are unaware of PFR’s legal philosophy and will need specific training. Other mechanisms contributed to this oversimplification of registration, such as the way diagnostic land studies were undertaken. Interviews with PFR field staff and farmers (in PGRN workshop reports from 1997 and 1998) revealed local mistrust of the state, especially in relation to land, based on a simple equation between state land intervention, taxation, and expropriation. See Bosc et al. (1996: 330ff) for Ivorian PFR evolutions. Despite the role of NGOs in the PGTRN phase, the project is still widely seen as a state initiative. Mary Douglas defines institution as a “legitimized social grouping” (1987: 46) and more precisely as a “naturalized convention” (52); see also Malinowski; quoted in Assier-Andrieu 1996: 65), who gives a functionalist viewpoint of the institution as a group of individuals bound by common tasks and rules. See Assier-Andrieu (1990: 31ff) on these two meanings of “local uses” (usages locaux), either consciously involving two persons in a

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

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form of convention or being “located” above individual wills as a repertoire of rules. See Ellen’s definition (reply to Sillitoe 1998: 238): “local, orally transmitted, a consequence of practical engagement reinforced by experience, empirical rather than theoretical, repetitive, fluid and negotiable, shared but asymmetrically distributed, largely functional, and embedded in a more encompassing cultural matrix.” In Northern Benin under President Maga, 1960 to 1963, for instance; see Moore (2000) for Zimbabwe; see von Oppen (1999, 2002) for Zambia and Tanzania. Anthropological theory may find a second life as commonsense ideology after its death as a scientific one (see Kuper 1982; Holy 1996). This echoes Elisabeth Colson (1971: 197) on “the confusion of sovereignty with proprietary ownership” favored by the systematic search for the owner of every piece of land. “Backstage” compared with public arenas of intervention. As Murphy puts it, following Goffman and Giddens, the “front/back regionalization . . . provides an organizational means for social actors to distance themselves from and maneuver around the constraints of institutional structures” (1990: 26). Action as “intention and realized knowledge” (Lenclud 1995: 58). The American legal realist school of law could be seen as a precursor of PFR (Assier-Andrieu 1996: 39; Moore 1978). Participation occurs at each stage: (1) the PFR must respond to an explicit social demand; (2) socioeconomic and landholding studies use participatory methods such as PRA; (3) the land inquiry records the views of rights holders and their neighbors through an unusual form of participant observation; (4) the data produced on rights and land is based on built consensus among actors; and (5) display of data in the public arena allows expression of disagreements before the final validation. PGTRN in Ouessé makes pragmatic use of ethnicizing terms such as Nagoland (Nago is a Yoruba “sub-group”), thus reproducing the colonial viewpoint that linked ethnic group, territory, and traditional authority.

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FIVE TRANSLATING, INTERPRETING, AND PRACTICING CIVIL SOCIETY IN VIETNAM

A Tale of Calculated Misunderstandings

Oscar Salemink

Introduction With the adoption of market economic reforms and an “open-door” policy in the second half of the 1980s, Vietnam embarked on a path toward economic and (increasingly) political integration into the region and the world. During the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Communist Vietnam became a (“normal”) country subject to and willingly participating in the process of globalization. Being a poor country, a post-war society, and a transition economy, Vietnam became triply eligible for international aid. The UN system, bilateral donors, and increasingly the Bretton Woods institutions (WB, IMF, and regional development banks) advised and financed Vietnam’s economic reforms while mitigating the worst effects of economic reforms and prescribed austerity measures. With growing exports, high growth rates, an increasingly liberal economy, and a growing middle class reaping the benefits, Vietnam became one of the success stories of the international development industry. Donors lauded the rapid decline in the proportion of poor households in the country (from 55 percent in 1993 to 36 percent in 1998, judged by very low Vietnamese definitions of poverty) and credited this success to reforms that Vietnam was encouraged to continue. However, poverty persisted at very high levels in certain pockets of the population, particularly among ethnic 101

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minorities and women in remote mountainous areas, which required the formation of specific poverty reduction programs to target these population groups and geographic regions. At the same time, the name Vietnam evoked images of war, bloodshed, and suffering, which had entered international consciousness as the first televised war evoking worldwide protest and solidarity. Whereas the latter sentiment had guided some bilateral donors—in particular, Scandinavian—it was mostly international NGOs from around the world that felt a moral obligation to mitigate the consequences of war and felt compelled to work in Vietnam. During the 1990s, hundreds of international NGOs (INGOs) poured into Vietnam in order to absolve their sense of guilt about the war and to put right what had been wrong. However, for many INGOs, their presence in Vietnam involved not only the relief and rehabilitation of Vietnam’s victims but also solidarity with Vietnam (and hence its political regime) against foreign intervention. Many INGOs also introduced novel ideas about civil society, gender equality, participatory development, and “bottom-up” approaches into Vietnam’s development landscape. For some INGOs, their formal mandate was to work directly with local NGOs—or else to promote the emergence of a civil society sector— rather than with Vietnam’s political authorities, thus creating political tensions in Vietnam’s authoritarian context. In this chapter, these tensions form the subtext for the analysis, which focuses on diverging and converging interests between (groups of) actors; on conflicts and accommodation; on different translations and interpretations, and attempts to find a common language; and hence on bodies of knowledge that are different but are not neatly fenced off along clear boundaries (e.g., between Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese, between central and local, between scientific and folk, between project staff and “beneficiaries”). The central focus of the chapter is how the discourse of civil society is introduced, interpreted, and played out in the interaction between various actors: foreign NGOs and their expatriate staff, local authorities, local quasi-NGOs, and project “beneficiaries.” I draw on eight years of experience in Vietnam from 1987, as a social science researcher, a consultant for a variety of different organizations and projects, and as a Vietnam-based employee of the Ford Foundation, a private donor organization with a strong interest in promoting civil society (1996–2001).1 The case study that follows is based on a midterm review (1995) of a problematic project involving a consortium of Dutch NGOs working in a central province of Vietnam. I shall develop this paper in four sections:

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on civil society discourse and how it relates to Vietnam; on the project history; on contested visions of development and civil society within this project; and on an analysis of the fuzzy meaning of civil society in the wider Vietnamese context. My main argument is that the introduction and translation of new concepts, discourses, and practices create tensions related to their differing interpretations, discursive languages, and political interests. These differences and tensions between a variety of actors (not just between Dutch and Vietnamese but also among Dutch and among Vietnamese) can, to a major degree, be mediated by mutual (linguistic) incomprehension, allowing actors to act as if their interpretation were the only meaning attached to words and actions. In this case, when the differences became too stark, an outside review team was called in to engage in a brokering process with the purpose of creating a common language. Although the effort was unsuccessful for that particular project, in Vietnam at large such miscomprehensions are very productive.

INGOs and civil society in Vietnam It is a truism to state that the concept of civil society (CS) has made a comeback during the last two decades (Glasius et al. 2004). Although the concept has a long history, as borne out by eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury publications by the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson and the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, only in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s did the concept begin to be used more widely by intellectuals in academic and political circles, and to appear in all sorts of policy documents and media reports. Its meaning was not very clear and it seemed to be defined more by what it was not (not state, not private sector, not private/family domain) than by what it was—usually a heterogeneous list of institutions and practices in the public arena that might include media, universities, labor unions, civic and professional associations, social movements, religious institutions, and NGOs in all their QUANGO (quasi-NGO), GONGO (governmentorganized NGO), and other forms (Fisher 1997: 448). In spite of recent attempts to put an end to the conceptual confusion surrounding civil society by constructing an elaborate theoretical edifice (e.g., Cohen and Arato 1992) or by testing the analytical value of the concept in particular applications (Fisher 1997; Lewis 2002), the currency of the concept in a variety of media and contexts has a largely rhetorical flavor. In this view, civil society is essentially a “good thing” to be promoted for the

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sake of democracy and freedom, balancing the power of the state and the private sector, and enhancing efficiency, accountability, and “good governance” (Fisher 1997; Barber 2001). Granting that civil society can have different meanings, sometimes oscillating between “Gramscian” and “liberal” interpretations (Gray 1999), I am interested in how the concept—as a rhetorical construct—is being used to promote, highlight, or obscure specific practices or relationships. This interest informs the scope of this chapter, in which I shall analyze the use of civil society in describing, promoting, or obscuring specific practices and relations in Vietnam, and the effects of these discursive practices on social and political relations. For this context, two distinctive rhetorical meanings of civil society are relevant: a politicized meaning as contributing to the flourishing of liberal democracy; and an economic interpretation as largely confined to development and service delivery by development NGOs. The second, economic meaning of civil society interprets it as more or less equivalent to development NGOs, a notion that has become more prominent in development discourse since the 1980s and 1990s. The position of NGOs was buttressed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio (Bigg 1997),2 inaugurating a strengthened role for NGOs at UN meetings and reflecting their increased importance in development. While NGOs started to collaborate regionally and internationally across national borders,3 multilateral agencies like the UN system and the World Bank began to “reach out to civil society.”4 The rise to prominence of NGOs within development discourse coincided with a critique of states as weak, corrupt, and incapable of delivering development. Weak and corrupt states were contrasted with more effective NGOs, which were assumed to be “closer to the grass roots,” engaged in “bottom-up” and “participatory” development, and a better guarantee of “good governance” than states could offer (Migdal 1988; Fowler 1991; Duffield 1992). A common assumption was that NGOs did a better job in development practice and—by offering an alternative and hence competition to the state—made government more accountable. This economic meaning of civil society was not politically neutral. Whereas the critique of the state as weak and corrupt and the partial substitution of some of its functions by NGOs had a left-wing flavor for many (Chambers 1997), it coincided with the neoliberal attack on the state by the Washington Consensus. Under the twin banners of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, the WB and IMF structural adjustment recipes truly globalized and forced a retreat of the state in the first, second, and third worlds in terms of delivering social services and welfare (Lewis

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2002), prompting some critics to claim that NGOs in fact facilitated the neoliberal onslaught (Petras 1997; Hardt and Negri 2000: 309–314). In Vietnam, “civil society” is clearly part of a foreign agenda and closely linked to international aid and development, because there is no domestic civil society sector that is independent or at least autonomous from the direct control of the state (due to a lack of enabling regulations and to policing) and party (through the tight surveillance via the Vietnam Fatherland Front).5 The 1990s brought capitalist economic reforms and market liberalization purportedly leading to a “socialist market economy.” The “opening up” of the country initiated a rapid integration into the regional and global economy, an influx of foreign investors, and a retreat of the state from major sectors of the economy and from the delivery of many social services. The 1990s also brought foreign donors, including the UN system, the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, many bilateral donors, and hundreds of INGOs, partially filling the void left by the retreating state. As a “post-socialist” but still Communistruled country, Vietnam became a “country in transition,” thus qualifying for international support with the explicit aim of speeding up the reforms. Currently, Vietnam is one of the “darlings” of the international donor community, one of the most important recipients of international aid in the Asian region, and one of the success stories in economic growth and poverty reduction.6 Many multilateral donors came with the explicit aim of supporting or promoting civil society in Vietnam, official Vietnamese misgivings over the term notwithstanding. Both UNDP and the World Bank have programs of reaching out to civil society and working with NGOs, but in both cases Vietnam’s civil society is limited not just to development NGOs but to international NGOs at that, as these seem to qualify exclusively for “partnership.”7 On a number of occasions I was—as a foreigner working for a private donor organization—invited by the World Bank to participate in civil society consultation sessions (with foreign “development experts”) where the consultation consisted primarily of not listening to critique. The 1990s also saw an exponential growth in the number of INGOs working in Vietnam. According to the Viet Nam INGO Directory 2002– 2003, the 181 listed INGOs disburse around $90 million per annum (a conservative figure that does not take transfer of knowledge, skills, and voluntary action into account). Many INGOs came to Vietnam with different motivations and hoped to be able to contribute to the “rebuilding” of the country after the wars (Borton 1995). In political terms most NGOs support the liberal economic reforms, which are seldom questioned in international fora and media. In Vietnam there does not seem

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to be the heated debate and mutual recrimination between “neo-liberal” institutions such as World Bank, Asian Development Bank, IMF, and major bilateral donors such as Japan and the European Union (EU), on the one hand, and “progressive” NGOs on the other hand, about the direction of the economic reforms (toward market liberalization and structural adjustment). On the contrary, the World Bank and INGOs find common ground in their joint critique of “top-down” central planning in Vietnam and the accompanying authoritarian attitudes. Whereas INGOs see it as their job to introduce “bottom-up approaches,” “gender equity,” and “participatory development” (usually through PRA exercises), the World Bank and other major donors are attacking top-down central planning from the angle of liberal market reforms. Simultaneously, the World Bank is increasingly engaged in the rhetoric of “pro-poor growth,” “bottom-up, participatory development,” and “gender mainstreaming” and succeeds in co-opting reputable INGOs such as Oxfam and Save the Children Fund UK by having them perform “participatory poverty assessments” and similar “bottom-up” exercises in order to gauge the effects of development and reform policies with qualitative research methods. Many international foundations and NGOs are morally, or by charter, obliged to work with domestic NGOs or to promote civil society, thus creating a large demand for civil society organizations or domestic NGOs in a country where a hegemonic party cum state leaves little space for association outside of state control.8 Since 1989, NGOs begin to be allowed into the country, and especially during the 1990s, when Vietnam was “hot” and seemed like “new territory,” the arrival of hundreds of INGOs bringing welcome development assistance to this impoverished country created tensions because of this demand for “domestic NGOs” as local partners. When a new word had to be coined in Vietnamese for “nongovernmental,” the literal translation “phi chinh phu” came very close to the existing Vietnamese word for “anarchy” (vo chinh phu), with similar anti-government and anti-authority connotations. In order to accommodate the INGOs, they were regulated and monitored by a new agency (People’s Aid Coordinating Committee, or PACCOM) under the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), an official agency in charge of the Communist concept of “people-to-people diplomacy.”9 PACCOM was supposed to assign geographic areas and counterpart organizations to the INGOs and was responsible for inscribing NGO aid into the official state budget (Hoang 1998). In Vietnamese, however, the word for this type of “friendship” (huu nghi) refers to official friendship between nations, much like solidarity, rather

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than the friendship between individuals, thus creating a wide gap between international notions of “nongovernmental” and Vietnamese notions of “friendship/solidarity.” The result usually was that INGOs were working together with line ministries and technical agencies, local authorities or local government agencies, and so-called mass organizations such as the Vietnam Women’s Union. Mass organizations are membership organizations for particular social categories such as women, farmers (Farmers Association), laborers (Labor Union), and youth (Youth Union) and are organized from the center down to the districts and communes. Although technically “nongovernmental,” these organizations carry out government policies at various levels, mobilize around particular causes, and represent the interests of these categories in policy fora. The mass organizations are tightly supervised by the Vietnam Fatherland Front under the Communist Party and are funded from the state budget. The Fatherland Front is also in charge of the supervision of other “civil society” organizations such as religious organizations, professional associations, and even clubs. Many INGOs, however, have to account to home constituencies and funders in the home country concerning their contribution to local civil society, thus creating a tension that is often bridged in creative ways. In the following sections I shall analyze one case where these conflicting expectations and tendencies have led to sometimes ironic results.

An integrated development project in Vietnam In February 1995 I was asked to be part of a review team concerning a specific development program in a province in central Vietnam, jointly implemented by a consortium of Dutch NGOs and the provincial authorities.10 The review attained extraordinary importance, because the whole program had been plagued by conflicts from the start: conflicts between the consortium members; between the coordinator and some NGOs; between the largest donor (a co-financing organization that was not part of the consortium)11 and consortium members; between the consortium and the Dutch expatriate staff; and between the expatriate staff and the province authorities. The program had become part of the rumor circuits in Vietnam and in Holland as a farce and a failure, so its continuation depended on the outcome of the midterm review. In this situation, the review naturally looked into the communication and links between the various partners. It consisted of

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documentary studies and interviews with all parties concerned, including the consortium members and the donor. Before turning to the findings, I will give a brief overview of the history of the program. Before the inauguration of economic reforms in 1987, Vietnam, being a Communist country, received aid from socialist countries and Scandinavian countries and from solidarity movement NGOs in Western countries. One of these solidarity movements was a small-scale Dutch health NGO that constructed and supported a hospital in our province from 1975 to 1990, creating a lot of goodwill in the province. Since 1989, “regular” NGOs started to come to Vietnam, and among these NGOs was a Christian Dutch co-financing organization (CFO), which mainly channeled Dutch government money to local NGOs. This CFO financed a number of projects in Vietnam, such as savings and credit schemes run by the Vietnam Women’s Union. In 1990 the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation lifted the political embargo of Vietnam after Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia and made direct and indirect bilateral aid possible, while expressing its preference for an integrated, multisector approach involving various Dutch NGOs. The CFO approached a number of other NGOs to combine efforts. All of these NGOs were humanitarian, health-related organizations that specialized in service delivery, and some had experience in the province, one of the poorest in Vietnam. They agreed to implement a multisector Primary Health Care/Community-Based Rehabilitation (PHC/CBR) and Women in Development (WID) program, extending their existing activities in the province. A preparatory study was written by two people without prior Vietnam experience, and based on their previous experience in Africa they propagated a participatory, action-research approach, which for them primarily meant conducting PRAs. This program was to be executed by (Dutch) expatriate staff, who would be better able to introduce a “bottom-up” approach within the “top-down” structure that was seen as Vietnam’s main flaw. A proposal was submitted to the Dutch Directorate of International Cooperation, which refused to provide financing because policy had suddenly changed again. Then the CFO left the consortium it had formed in order to assume the role of main donor, while a smaller organization specializing in agroforestry in Vietnam became part of it, adding an agroforestry program to the PHC/CBR and WID components. In September 1993, a joint “Framework” document was signed by the consortium and the province, making the program legally a “joint venture.” The document had been written and devised in Holland and, although available in English, was only partly (and badly) translated

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into Vietnamese. The Provincial People’s Committee (PPC: provincial authorities) nevertheless agreed to sign because of the local reputation of some of the participating NGOs. Moreover, with the economic reforms—primarily decollectivization, de facto privatization, and the retreat of the state—the local government had lost its handle on the population; notions of local communities “participating” in their own development became very attractive in that context. On the other hand, the PPC took a political risk, because the direct local presence of a foreign development organization was a comparatively new phenomenon in Vietnam, where INGOs were required to have a representative office in Hanoi or HCM-City. Official permission came in August 1994, when the expatriate staff was already there. The original program was assumed to be the first stage in a longer development effort, mainly through (1) acquiring information through “action research,” and (2) continuing the extant sectoral programs. The program was scheduled to run from February 1994 to February 1996, but started much later because the Dutch staff had to be recruited, trained, and prepared, and an extensive compound consisting of one office building and four villas had to be built especially for the purpose. During the preparation period in Holland, the staff perceived a contradiction between action research—by definition flexible—and the sectoral programs, which were narrowly circumscribed and budgeted. Therefore, they staged a “coup,” making the “action research” development planning the central and coordinating part of the program, and adding a financial assistance (or “mini-project”) program to immediately “reward” local communities for participation in the PRAs. So here the first transformations of the original policy took place in terms of time frame and planning. Understandable as these transformations may have seemed to those initiating them, they also created problems, tensions, and misunderstandings between different actors. I shall present these in the form of four problem areas. A first problem area concerned another transformation, this time in the conceptualization of the status and role of the general project unit (GPU), consisting of the expatriate project staff in the province. The CFO wrote in an internal document attached to the financing decision (available only in Dutch), that the program should contribute to (1) reversing top-down to bottom-up decision-making; (2) creating indigenous NGOs; and (3) strengthening civil society. This highly ideological and hence explosive document was not available to the Vietnamese counterpart, although it was part of the core instruction for the general project manager (who took leave from the CFO to lead the project) and other

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expatriates. In other words, although the CFO was the donor and the consortium was the joint executor of the program, the informal influence of the CFO (which had conceived of the program in the first place) was very strong, politicizing an approach that initially seemed to be a joining of forces in service delivery by a number of health NGOs. This might have been encouraged by laziness on the part of the smaller Dutch sectoral NGOs, which probably read only “their part” of the project document and skipped the rest. Anyway, the GPU saw it as their mission (conceived almost in religious terms) to channel development efforts along NGO lines, although the Vietnamese state is relatively strong and effective down to the village level and allowed very little space for autonomous organizations. A second problem area had to do with the GPU conceiving of itself as an independent NGO working in the province, rather than as employees in a joint venture with the province authorities. The GPU managed to convince the consortium leaders to request NGO status for the “Provincial Friendship and Development Association,” the official name for the program.12 For the province, the Association was a “friendship organization” with “solidarity” organizations on the Dutch side. In the eyes of the PPC (and according to earlier written agreements) the GPU was the executive development arm of the Friendship Association, jointly managed and owned by the Dutch and Vietnamese sides. The Dutch GPU, however, appropriated the name of the Friendship Association in a letter to the central authorities in Vietnam, bypassing the province. This issue of the status of the Friendship Association came to a head in December 1994, when the GPU wished to employ Vietnamese staff but refused the persons proposed by the PPC. On the assumption that the Friendship Association was an independent NGO with the GPU as its executive unit, the expatriates were right; but considering that the Friendship Association was a joint Dutch-Vietnamese venture, the PPC was right. The GPU referred to the internal CFO document, whereas the PPC referred to the joint “Framework” as the legal basis for cooperation. A period of conflict and harassment by the provincial authorities began, and the general program manager even turned to the central authorities, much to the dismay of the province. A number of the consortium members with experience in Vietnam strongly disagreed with the GPU, stating that this was a cooperation program with the government. The general project manager was then revoked to Holland, key provincial leaders were invited to Holland, and the matter was resolved in favor of the Vietnamese partner, as established in the original Memorandum of Understanding (“Framework”) between the consortium and the province.

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Related to this was a third problem that the review team referred to as a communication problem. Communication followed a “sand-clock model,” meaning that all communication between Holland and Vietnam should be channeled through the Dutch coordinator and the general project manager for reasons of effective coordination. However, this was perceived as a monopoly of communication by two main partners: the PPC and the consortium members. For the PPC it was politically embarrassing to have to deal with the GPU on “equal” terms, and to have no direct contact lines with their actual counterpart, the consortium. For the consortium members it was often embarrassing to have no direct access to what they perceived as a continuation of “their” sectoral programs, or to have no satisfactory reply to requests concerning information for publicity or fundraising purposes. One example of this concerned a few bicycles donated by pupils of a Dutch primary school through one of the NGOs. The GPU did not respond to requests for photographic material of these bicycles for this school, because it was not in the “terms of reference” of their job. The sand-clock communication model was quickly rechristened “bottleneck model” by the review team. A fourth problem concerned the progress of the program in terms of service delivery, as compared to the effort made in action research and building the compound, and compared to the original time schedule. Implementation was delayed for a variety of reasons; for example, preparation time was not scheduled, official permission from the central government came late, and it was difficult to find suitable Vietnamese personnel in the province (while recruiting from elsewhere was blocked by the PPC). The first six months, moreover, were marked as a learningby-doing and research period, producing very little concrete output. In addition, the coordinator of the core sectoral program, PHC/CBR, became seriously ill in November 1994, had to leave the country, and eventually quit the job, resulting in a virtual standstill of the program, at least until the midterm review. As this was the sectoral program in which six out of seven consortium members were most interested, the consortium was not at all pleased with the degree of progress in this, nor was the Vietnamese partner. The other sectoral programs started off very slowly as well, because of the “participatory” action-research approach. In fact, there was a real contradiction between the flexibility and gradualness implied in the action research, and the budgetary and time constraints of the sectoral programs. Partly to overcome this contradiction, the “mini-project” approach (financial assistance development program) was implemented, which spent up to $5,000 for small projects coming out of PRAs, as an “immediate” reward (although the

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procedure was still considered tedious by local communities). Whereas the province and the consortium (and, as we shall see, the beneficiaries) regarded the lack of progress as a problem, the GPU did not. In the words of the general project manager, “the best development project does not require outside funding”—a remark that obviously did not take their own salaries, benefits, and living quarters into account. The purpose of mentioning the preceding problems is not to indicate that the program was not run well but to draw attention to the fact that plans were transformed as a result of the conflicting interests, expectations, views, and cultural backgrounds of stakeholders at the decisionmaking levels of the development program. These conflicts occurred through encounters, at interfaces, generating varying discourses that seemed disconnected because of the “bottleneck”-type communication. The conflicts clearly point to differing ideological notions concerning civil society, the role of NGOs, and the role of the state. Interestingly, the review team was charged with evaluating the contribution made by the Friendship Association to strengthening Vietnamese civil society—a concept never mentioned in the official documents, except for the internal CFO one.13 For the Vietnamese partners, the concept of civil society had no meaning whatsoever, and the Dutch partners were hardly able to describe it. In the next section I shall discuss the role of the review team in assessing the actual implementation of the program.

Translating, interpreting, and contesting development concepts One of the main tasks of the review team was to find out whether the adopted “action research” strategy was suitable in the Vietnamese context. The assumption of the consortium was that the Vietnamese authorities might have difficulties with the approach. This assumption was not altogether unfounded, because the provincial authorities initially had difficulty in accepting the strategy, if only because the term “action research” acquires a politicized meaning (nghien cuu van dong, or “political mobilization research”) when translated into Vietnamese, and “mobilization” is the prerogative of the Communist Party and its subordinate mass organizations. The action research and the participatory methods were geared toward awareness raising and mobilization rather than technical skills or tangible outside inputs. However, the singular way in which the action research was put into practice (PRA) was not alien to Vietnam, because it was then the big fashion among

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foreign NGOs, and increasingly taught at Vietnamese universities as a research method. Thus, even though the provincial authorities had a reputation for being conservative, they gradually got used to the idea. As far as the local authorities were concerned, at district and commune levels, the time was actually ripe for a development approach aimed at mobilizing people to participate in (and contribute to) the development process. After the transformation from a centrally led to a market economy, local authorities received less budgetary support, meaning that they had to rely more on their own resources. They were therefore more or less forced to seek popular consent and participation if they wished to develop their locality. In other words, provided that authorities could control the process, “action research” and “participatory development” offered the potential of becoming tools of governance by extending political control and mobilizing support among the “target population.” As it happened, the PRAs were executed rather defectively, compared to Robert Chambers’ original idea, which is to enhance local community understanding of and participation in the development process. In actual practice, PRAs were not even executed as needs assessments, but as local processes of selection of projects, to be funded by the “miniproject” program. These processes were often dominated by local authorities, who claimed expression of people’s aspirations and sovereignty. Besides, authorities knew better than local farmers, whose lack of knowledge and skills was to be compensated for by the introduction of science and technology (see Heaton, Chapter 9, this volume). For the local communities, PRAs were executed to please the Dutch development workers. One interlocutor said that “of course they themselves knew already what their own needs were, but they thought it might be useful for the foreign development workers to know about local needs and conditions.” In general, however, local people had two complaints. First, they had already decided which project to propose after one session, but they were forced to participate in many more sessions, which they considered a waste of (valuable because scarce) time. But still they participated in all the sessions in order to please the development worker and to “get” the project. Sometimes, if the development worker left the PRA session, local people would want to abandon it—implying that they saw the PRA as a show staged for the benefit of foreign development workers. The review team referred to this as the “Santa Claus effect.” The second complaint of villagers was that they had to wait too long for projects, which involved too many procedures.

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Both Vietnam’s authoritarian “top-down” governance structure and the INGOs’ ideological “bottom-up” approaches are predicated on a discursive dichotomy between beneficiaries (i.e., the “target groups” of development interventions) and the benefactors (i.e., development agents, authorities, experts). Development identities and relationships are thus neatly circumscribed and constructed, even if such compartmentalization is largely fictitious, as Benedetta Rossi (Chapter 2, this volume) claims. In spite of ideological differences, both “bottom-up” and “topdown” approaches constitute beneficiaries at the receiving end of knowledge circulation strategies. Where Vietnam’s top-down structure basically assumes that farmers and other “target groups” lack knowledge and skills, and hence are in need of the science and technology that authorities and experts can bring, the NGO ideology of “bottom-up” development sees beneficiaries as technically knowledgeable but in need of awareness raising. Both approaches, therefore, require education and training as central elements in their development intervention strategies. Although it is not useful to assume a radical compartmentalization of “knowledge worlds” between beneficiaries and benefactor, the practical implications of the differing ideological assumptions underpinning development discourses can be very tangible. One illuminating example of this concerns a well construction project that had been selected as a “mini-project” by one commune. The review team found that many of the sixty wells were not constructed or located properly, having bad water or no water at all. Upon investigation of this issue, it turned out that the relevant district service knew about these problems in advance but was not sufficiently involved in the execution because it had to be a “local” (community) affair. It also turned out that in the neighboring commune, with similar natural conditions, people had tackled the problem of clean drinking water by putting in hand pumps. Thus, instead of identifying the problem and analyzing the alternatives to solve it, which should involve relevant line agencies and studying solutions in other places, the PRA was conceived of as a project selection process, which, although celebrating community input, basically disqualified the technical knowledge embodied in line agencies for political reasons. And because the local population and project staff were not familiar with solutions for water sanitation other than wells, it had to be a wells project. Insufficient effort was made to study and analyze the problem, while the district authorities had the impression that they were not “allowed” to intervene or interfere. In other words, technical knowledge and skills had been sacrificed for the

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populist rhetoric of awareness raising and community “participation,” even if such participation was technically inadequate. While constituting clear-cut beneficiary and benefactor identities, both “top-down” and “bottom-up” types of development ideologies created dependency on outside experts—whether these experts were technical or process-oriented. With the introduction of notions of participation, the development project activities depended very much on the Dutch development workers, thus adding another layer of dependence that had to do with ideological bias against the role of government in development. Because the Dutch expatriates tended to consider themselves as NGO staff, they had no clear-cut program of transferring responsibilities to Vietnamese governmental counterparts, whom they did not consider to be true “civil society.” The pro–civil society and antigovernment attitude among Dutch project staff sometimes resulted in distrust of Vietnamese staff and questions about loyalty. For instance, the highest-ranking Vietnamese person in the Friendship Association and the GPU had been appointed by the provincial authorities, but he was never accepted by the Dutch expatriate staff as a true “NGO” person, and his loyalty was constantly called into question. In this way, Dutch expatriate staff arrogated to themselves the right to assess the civil society credentials of local staff and partners and hence created continued dependence. On the other hand, there was a massive and rather successful training program, which unintentionally strengthened local authorities and government services rather than nongovernmental structures. Although this was, of course, against the Dutch ideology of strengthening civil society, it did not mean that the programs were altogether unsuccessful. Indeed, the Vietnamese government structures were relatively effective in service delivery—in this sense constituting a strong state. In fact, the most successful sectoral program was the Grameen Bank–style rotational savings and credit scheme of the WID program, run entirely by the local chapter of the Women’s Union, a Vietnamese mass organization. Their success questioned, of course, the need for the heavy (and costly) presence of the Dutch expatriate staff. Privately, some Dutch development workers confided that they should not have been sent to Vietnam in the first place. Given the current dependence on their contribution, however, their immediate withdrawal would result in the collapse of most of the program. This was acknowledged by both Vietnamese staff and local authorities, who stated that the input of Dutch “experts” was needed for another two years. Thus, dependence on foreign experts was written into the project from the start.

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The program contributed to the capacity of the local authorities to cope with the changing conditions in Vietnam—the transition to a market economy and the abolition of subsidies, which meant that they had to rely more on their own resources. Contributing to an enhanced capacity to involve local communities in the planning and execution of development activities, the program strengthened local government agencies and hence political authorities rather than civil society. Ultimately, service delivery via state agencies and parastatal organizations (Women’s Union) turned out to be more effective in reaching the “target groups” than the creation of indigenous NGOs could have been. At the province level, the Vietnamese authorities had also thought about this problem. They were well aware that indigenous NGOs were a privileged channel for receiving and transmitting foreign aid. Therefore, they had planned that with the eventual withdrawal of Dutch expatriate staff, the Friendship Association would become part of the provincial “Union of Friendship Organizations”—an official mass organization that was chaired by the vice-chairman of the PPC, which would have an executive development branch and would be in charge of the relations with the Dutch consortium of NGOs. They figured that the Friendship Association would technically have NGO status, and its local staff would have the capacity to run other foreign-sponsored development projects in the future. Of course, the creation of such a GONGO was not what some of the Dutch consortium members and the CFO had in mind when they suggested that the program should strengthen civil society. Yet the emergence of “local development groups” is a widespread effect of development interventions in Vietnam and has a noted impact on the local government performance (Fritzen 2003). Thus, in the course of implementation, the development program was changed according to the compromises reached by the various parties involved. Most of these changes were not reflected in the externally oriented documents produced by the joint Friendship Association. Indeed, however flexible the action research and “learning-by-doing” approach was thought to be, the basic structure remained that of a plan to be implemented without flaws. In order to achieve that, the Friendship Association had been set up as a rather hierarchical organization with links to state structures at various levels that should facilitate the introduction of a “bottom-up” approach, from above. As it was, the review team found a lot of flaws in the program, especially when compared with the official rhetoric surrounding it. However, if their report was too critical, it was almost certain that funding would stop, and this would be counterproductive, since so much investment had been made,

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so many expectations had been raised, so many people had been trained, and at least some of the sectoral programs had begun to be implemented satisfactorily, despite initial delay. Moreover, in the sociopolitical conditions of Vietnam, the program did make a significant contribution to improvement of the performance of local authorities. Finally, at the time, the program was clearly an experiment in the Vietnamese context, watched jealously by the central authorities and INGOs. Its failure could have grave repercussions for future relations between INGOs, the Vietnamese state, and local authorities, in the analysis of the Vietnamese review team members. Therefore, in line with the opinion of all people in the field (Vietnamese and Dutch), the first priority of the review team was the continuation of the program. This entailed compromise on the part of the review team as well. It did not mean that all criticism was hidden, but it was phrased in such a way as to point to improvement rather than discontinuation. For example, the need for a clear-cut program of transfer of skills and responsibilities to Vietnamese staff, with a definite time schedule, was stressed. Moreover, much criticism concerned the structure and functioning of the consortium itself. The review team pointed to the commitments made and expectations raised, and recommended appropriate organizational measures to be taken, in line with the original framework of cooperation with the Vietnamese provincial authorities. This proved to be sufficiently convincing for the consortium members to want to continue funding the program, for they could show success to their constituencies. Nevertheless, within two years the project would be phased out because the Dutch consortium of NGOs collapsed under internal conflicts, and the relationships between various stakeholders had soured too much. The CFO decided to establish a semipermanent office in a nearby central Vietnamese city, where it continued to support activities and institutions that looked like civil society.

The politics of civil society in Vietnam This case study reads, of course, as a classic tale of both hilarious misunderstanding and tragic failure, played out against the backdrop of rapid social transformation and deep poverty. I wish to highlight three things from this case. The first is the persistent attempt on the part of many foreign donors and NGOs to create a Vietnamese civil society, narrowly defined as development NGOs. Second is a tendency on the

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part of Vietnamese authorities to have certain state-related institutions pass for NGOs, in order to be able to attract foreign funding. And third is the comparative success of Vietnamese development programs in spite of an absence of effective civil society organizations. I shall deal with these three related issues in the following paragraphs. In 1999 Michael Gray published an article in Development and Change entitled “Creating Civil Society? The Emergence of NGOs in Vietnam,” in which he noted the tendency in Vietnam to repackage particular institutions as Vietnamese NGOs, mainly for donor consumption. Gray (1999: 698) distinguishes three types of would-be NGOs: (1) government mass organizations, (2) university- or hospital-based groups, and (3) individuals who form their own organizations. Mass organizations such as the Women’s Unions, Labor Union, Farmers Association, and Youth Union are controlled by the Vietnam Fatherland Front under the auspices of the Communist Party and are funded by the state; staff down to district level receive salaries from the state. Yet many INGOs have elected mass organizations as their counterparts, in particular the Women’s Union. This is echoed by foreign analysts like Mark Sidel (1995: 296). In a recent, badly informed article, Chizuko Suzuki even claims that the “local chapters [of the Women’s Union] also serve as local NGOs that are the counterparts of international NGOs” (2002: 151). It is important to realize that the attempt of various organizations to pass as official NGOs is a two-way street, involving accommodation on the part of INGOs and by their local counterparts. Some political scientists dodge this issue altogether by speaking of “civic organizations” that can include any format (Wischermann 2003; Wischermann and Vinh 2003). In Vietnam the number of organizations that can be accredited as NGO-like and are allowed to receive foreign funding is limited. Such organizations typically call themselves “centers” because they are composed of or led by academics and are often registered as “research centers” under provincial departments, universities, or professional associations such as the Association of Ethnologists or the Association of Folk Culture Studies (see Thaveeporn 2003). Usually such centers are led by trusted senior persons. In the words of Katrine Pedersen, “These Vietnamese NGOs can best be characterized as non-profit development businesses. Even though they seem to operate quite autonomously their existence depends on personal relations with Party members or state bureaucrats, and they enjoy a weak legal status” (2001: 17). Usually, the thirty such NGO-like research centers in the country perform applied research, offer development services, and sometimes do their own

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projects. They are not membership NGOs and tend to be dominated by strong, well-connected individuals. The two examples mentioned by Sidel (1995: 297–299)—CRES (Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies) and CGFED (Center for Gender, Family and Environment in Development)—have risen and fallen with the vicissitudes of succession of their respective leaders. The third category mentioned by Gray, namely “individuals not associated with earlier groups forming their own organizations, including local staff of international NGOs” (1999: 698), perform similar services to those of the “research centers.” However, such groups tend to have problems with the formal registration process that is required in order to qualify for foreign funding. Official registration may take many years, and the process is often perceived as utterly arbitrary. Such groups tend to be very much in demand, provided that they offer services for INGOs. As NGOs, such centers are not membership organizations, and they tend to be completely dependent on foreign donors. Usually, such groups, organizations, or centers tend to be engaged with development processes in a depoliticized way. Most of these organizations do not take their role seriously as “Civil Society Organizations” in fostering critical debate. If they do engage in political representation on behalf of local constituencies rather than pleasing international donors, they run into trouble. For instance, at the time of writing, the organization highlighted by Michael Gray as an interesting model (1999: 701–703) was under official “investigation” for championing ethnic minority rights both locally and in international fora (personal communication, April and July 2003). Its key donor—coincidentally the Dutch CFO described in my case study—encourages local NGOs to play such roles but found its movement into and within Vietnam restricted. As the Vietnamese state has been in retreat since the early 1990s, it has left space for other organizations to deliver social services that it no longer can fund or organize itself. Much of this space is taken up by INGOs and other international organizations that claim the promotion of local civil society as part of their mission. One of the perverse effects of the discourse and practice of civil society in Vietnam, however, is that where INGOs are occupying this space, there is no need for the state to allow for the emergence of domestic NGOs. Since the early 1990s the Vietnamese government has mulled over new legislation. In 1995 Mark Sidel wrote that “a policy and drafting committee is now active in Hanoi, drafting a law on non-profit groups which seeks to balance encouragement of nonstate initiative and state control” with inputs from the “foreign NGO community in Vietnam, the Ford Foundation,

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and others” (Sidel 1995: 301). By the time I joined the Ford Foundation in early 1996, the draft law was in its twenty-somethingth version, but all drafts had reportedly been shot down before they were made public. The issue is not simply the urge for control; Vietnam has relaxed economic and other policies where, from its perspective, this suited national interests. Rather, the issue is that there seems to be little need to encourage a domestic civil society sector where a vibrant INGO community exists. The INGOs effectively deliver services that the retreating state no longer can take on, and contribute to capacity building within their counterpart organizations, whether these be line ministries, local government agencies, universities and research groups, or parastatals such as the Women’s Union (often relabeled as domestic NGOs in order to please the foreign constituencies of the INGOs, as I discussed earlier). But at the same time, the INGO community is marginal to Vietnamese society and hence politically innocuous. Generally, in support of the direction of reforms, INGOs form the perfect proxy for civil society in Vietnam, as the World Bank and UNDP have discovered when “reaching out to civil society.” Now, even though a politicized interpretation of civil society (concerned with democratization) failed miserably in Vietnam, an economic interpretation (concerned with efficiency and good governance) remains. The rhetorical assumption here is that civil society can do better than the state in development and service delivery. But the question is whether this claim can be sustained. Of course, internationally Vietnam is often criticized as an authoritarian and corrupt state, generally lacking transparency and accountability. But Vietnam is also a strong state, with relatively strong and well-functioning institutions hierarchically organized from the center down to the districts and communes. In fact, policy making and implementation is much more decentralized than generally acknowledged (Kerkvliet 2001a; Koh 2001), and policies by and large work. In this context, the macroeconomic figures about economic growth and poverty alleviation speak for themselves, turning Vietnam into one of the World Bank’s success stories of postsocialist market transition and of structural adjustment in general. International aid, including aid from INGOs, has strengthened the Vietnamese state, which picked up from international development discourse the one element that was lacking in Vietnam: the notion of “participation” in development. Coming back to the micro level of the case study, the principle of “participation” enabled the provincial Women’s Union and its district and local chapters to revive their local presence by giving women’s groups a new stake through group-based microcredit programs. The

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Women’s Union had the vertical organization and spread to make the microcredit programs work, and the organization learned quickly to extend the concept elsewhere. Although not flawless, by and large the microcredit programs run by the Vietnam Women’s Union (often with support from INGOs) achieved significant results, as indicated by numerous evaluations.14 Vietnamese discussions of civil society often turn quickly to the question of participation (Bach Tan Sinh 2001). In the 1990s, “bottom-up” approaches became a welcome addition when “top-down” approaches failed because of a lack of resources on the part of the state. Participation in terms of local priorities and voluntary contributions has become indispensable in light of the retreat of the state and of structural adjustment. One form of “participation” became policy with the enactment of the principle of “socialization” (xa hoi hoa) in the social sectors of health, education, and culture. Close to what non-Vietnamese would probably call “privatization,” Vietnamese-style “socialization” calls for beneficiary contributions to the services that they want. When corrupt local administrations became a political liability—as evidenced from rural uprisings in Thai Binh and Lam Dong provinces in 1997—the Vietnamese government started a “grassroots democracy” campaign to foster more accountability and transparency through local elections. While nurturing some debate at local levels, the policies of “socialization” and “grassroots democracy” not only borrowed from NGO rhetoric but actually achieved some level of “participation”—both material and political—at local levels, without ever calling into question the larger political decisions of the government or the leadership of the Communist Party. This kind of “participation” is a far cry from the type of liberal democracy and freedom that proponents of the politicized interpretation of civil society would like to see develop.

Conclusion I began this chapter with a rather superficial exploration of the concept of civil society as rhetorical construct, a “good thing” in terms of democratization and of “good governance.” When exported to a country where anything resembling the various definitions of civil society seems to be lacking, the question is how civil society is interpreted and whether the rhetoric of civil society makes good on its promises. Outside the discursive context of human rights and democratization, civil society discourse in Vietnam is usually equated with development

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(and also environmental) NGOs, both local and international, and with the development concepts and practices that they introduce. These concepts can largely be captured under the headings of “participation” and “bottom-up” decision-making processes—concepts with a rhetorical flavor and mobilizing overtones (other such concepts are “gender equality” and “sustainability”). For development organizations around the world—donors as well as recipients—such terms became central legitimating concepts. In my case study I have argued how the introduction of such terms in Vietnam resulted in misunderstanding, mistranslations, contestations, and the ultimately unsuccessful search for common discursive ground. Various groups and actors try to deal with such disjunctures in the field by holding on to their own interpretations and keeping the discursive edifice that legitimize their development projects toward their respective constituencies, while turning a blind eye to alternative interpretations espoused by counterparts, beneficiaries, or other actors. Project management and evaluation, then, must constitute attempts to broker between these diverging interests and interpretations. Whereas the project described in the case study has been unsuccessful by most standards, the same cannot be said of development more generally in Vietnam. Vietnam’s relative success as a developing country is, at least to some degree, the result of diverging interpretations and mutual misunderstandings of central concepts in development discourse, such as “civil society” and “participation.”

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper at the Institute for Development Research at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia (1995). The paper was also circulated among staff of the cofinancing organization that is portrayed in this paper. In an e-mail, staff of the organization objected to the analysis, not because they felt it would be untruthful but rather because the events took place a number of years ago, and the organization claimed that it had learned from its mistakes since then. I have benefited from inspiration from and comments by EIDOS colleagues, in particular Philip Quarles van Ufford, David Mosse, David Lewis, and Rüdiger Korff, as well as from my extended experience as Ford Foundation program officer in Thailand and Vietnam. All mistakes, however, are my responsibility only.

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2. See http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/ngo-un/gen/2000/1122. htm. 3. See, for instance, http://www.oneworld.org (“One World is the world’s favorite and fastest-growing civil society network online, supporting people’s media to help build a more just global society”); http://www.civicus.org (“CIVICUS is an international alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world”); and Focus on the Global South, http:// www.focusweb.org. 4. For the United Nations system, see http://www.globalpolicy.org/ ngos/ngo-un/index.htm#2; for the World Bank, see the website “The World Bank and Civil Society” http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/ EXTERNAL/TOPICS/CSO/0,,pagePK:220469~theSitePK:228717,00. html. 5. See Kervliet (2003) and Thaveeporn (2003). Joerg Wischermann (2003) and Wischermann and Vinh (2003) circumvent the definition of civil society in their survey of “civic organizations,” which include Communist Party–led and government-funded mass organizations. 6. Average ODA (Official Development Assistance) over the last few years has been $1.5 billion per annum. The average economic growth rate has been around 6 percent during years of global economic recession. According to the World Bank Vietnam Living Standards Surveys, the percentage of poor people decreased from 55 percent in 1993 to 36 percent in 1998, with a further drop in poverty since then. Vietnam’s ranking on the Human Development Index is much higher than could be expected from its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of around $400. See http://www.undp. org.vn/undp/fact/index.htm and http://www.worldbank.org.vn/. 7. For World Bank, see http://www.worldbank.org.vn/partner/ partner.htm; for the UN system, see http://www.un.org.vn/, and go to “development partnership,” then to “civil society” group. 8. Examples are Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung, http://www.fes-hanoi.org; the Asia Foundation, http://www.asiafoundation.org/Locations/ vietnam.html; my former employer, the Ford Foundation, http:// www.fordfound.org/global/office/index.cfm?office=Hanoi; as well as the Dutch co-financing organizations Novib/Oxfam NL and ICCO, which channel government funds to domestic NGOs. 9. In a conversation with the author, the present president of VUFO, established and funded by the government, claimed that VUFO really was an NGO as well.

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10. For reasons of privacy and protection, I shall leave out the exact names of persons, organizations, and locations. 11. In the Dutch development cooperation landscape, co-financing organizations are quasi-autonomous development NGOs that on the one hand represent particular religious or world-view categories in Dutch society and on the other hand receive annual block grants to channel Dutch government funding to southern NGOs. 12. The real name, containing the name of the province, is concealed here. 13. The review team was also to review the implementation against the objectives; however, no explicit objectives could be found in the project documents. 14. See http://www.alternative-finance.org.uk/rtf/doc00123mx/rtf and evaluation reports in the VUFO-NGO Resource Center library, http://www.ngocentre.netnam.vn/ngores_e/libfr.htm.

References Bach Tan Sinh. 2001. Civil society and NGOs in Vietnam: Some initial thoughts on developments and obstacles. Paper presented at the Meeting with the Delegation of the Swedish Parliamentary Commission on Swedish Policy for Global Development to Vietnam, Hanoi, 2/26–3/3/2002. Barber, B.R. 2001. Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s challenge to democracy, 2nd ed. New York: Ballantine Books. Bigg, Tom. 1997. NGOs and the UN system since the Rio summit. http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/ngo-un/gen/2000/1122.htm. Borton, Lady. 1995. After sorrow: An American among the Vietnamese. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Chambers, R. 1997. Whose reality counts? Putting the first last. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Cohen, J.L., and A. Arato. 1992. Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Duffield, M. 1992. The emergence of two-tier welfare in Africa: Marginalization or an opportunity for reform? Public Administration and Development 12(1992):139–154. Fisher, W. 1997. Doing good? The politics of NGO practices. Annual Review of Anthropology 26:439–464. Fowler, A. 1991. The role of NGOs in changing state-society relations: Perspectives from eastern and southern Africa. Development Policy Review 9:53–84.

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Fritzen, S. 2003. Donors, local development groups and institutional reform over Vietnam’s development decade. In Getting organized in Vietnam: Moving in and around the socialist state, edited by B.J. Tria Kerkvliet, R.H.K. Heng, and D.W.H. Koh. Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 224–270. Glasius, M., D. Lewis, and H. Seckinelgin, eds. 2004. Exploring civil society: Political and cultural contexts. London: Routledge. Gray, M. 1999. Creating civil society? The emergence of NGOs in Vietnam. Development and Change 30:693–713. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoang, N.A. 1998. Challenges and problems of international nongovernmental work in the communist countries: The case of Vietnam. Unpublished MSc dissertation. Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics. Kerkvliet, B. 2001. An approach for analyzing state-society relations in Vietnam. Sojourn 16(2):238–278. Kerkvliet, B.J. Tria. 2003. Introduction: Grappling with organizations and the state in contemporary Vietnam. In Getting organized in Vietnam: Moving in and around the socialist state, edited by B.J. Tria Kerkvliet, Russell H.K. Heng, and D.W.H. Koh. Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 1–24. Kerkvliet, B.J. Tria, Russell H.K. Heng, and D.W.H. Koh, eds. 2003. Getting organized in Vietnam: Moving in and around the socialist state. Singapore: ISEAS. Koh, D. 2001. Negotiating the socialist state in Vietnam through local administrators: The case of karaoke shops. Sojourn 16(2):279–305. Lewis, D. 2002. Civil society in African contexts: Reflections on the “usefulness” of a concept. Development and Change 33(4):569–586. Migdal, J. 1988. Strong societies and weak states: State-society relations and state capabilities in the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pedersen, K. Riisgaard. 2001. Civil society in the context of development aid: The case of Vietnam. Copenhagen: IKL/CBS Working paper. Petras, J. 1997. Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America. Monthly Review 49(December 1997):10–27. Sidel, M. 1995. The emergence of a nonprofit sector and philanthropy in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In Emerging civil society in the Asia Pacific community, edited by T. Yamamoto. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies; Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, pp. 293–304.

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Suzuki, C. 2002. Vietnam: Control of NGOs by NGOs. In The state and NGOs: Perspectives from Asia, edited by S. Shigetomi. Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 161–177. Thaveeporn, Vasavakul. 2003. From fence-breaking to networking: Interests, popular organizations, and policy influences in postsocialist Vietnam. In Getting organized in Vietnam: Moving in and around the socialist state, edited by Ben J. Tria Kerkvliet, R.H.K. Heng, and D.W.H. Koh. Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 25–61. VUFO NGO Resource Center. 2002. Viet Nam INGO Directory 2002–2003. Hanoi: VUFO-NGO Resource Center. http://www.ngocentre.netnam. vn/ngores_e/libfr.htm. Wischermann, J. 2003. Vietnam in the era of Doi Moi: Issue-oriented organizations and their relationship to the government. Asian Survey 43(6):867–889. Wischermann, J., and Nguyen Quang Vinh. 2003. The relationship between civic organizations and government organizations in Vietnam: Selected findings. In Getting organized in Vietnam: Moving in and around the socialist state, edited by Ben J. Tria Kerkvliet, R.H.K. Heng, and D.W.H. Koh. Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 185–233.

SIX BROKERING FAIR TRADE

Relations between Coffee Cooperatives and Alternative Trade Organizations—A View from Costa Rica

Peter Luetchford

Introduction Recent enthusiasm among consumers, lobbyists, and development agencies for ethically motivated trade is only now being met by sustained investigation into the way it operates.1 This chapter examines the strategies, commitments, and experiences of a core group of actors involved at the production end of the spectrum. The focus is on managers of coffee cooperatives, NGOs, and other agencies in Costa Rica who negotiate fair trade deals with counterparts in the north. The managers are generally young, professional men who live with their families in rural areas, close to the cooperatives in which they work. The data were gathered during a series of semiformal interviews carried out from 1998 to 1999, and again in 2003.2 The wider context is the Costa Rican coffee economy and the political struggles by and on behalf of producers; but their story and perspective situate fair trade within the history of a group of cooperatives and their efforts to engage with commodity markets. As brokers between coffee farmers and northern organizations, the cooperative managers hold key positions in economic, political, and cultural processes. While they represent farmers in the coffee market, they also use fair trade as part of their own strategies to build strong commercial organizations. Indeed, managers explained how engagement with alternative markets was part of a history of local and regional 127

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development shaped by these strategies, by their vision and their politics. For them, efficiency and modern organizations are a prerequisite for success, and they have an interest in promoting this view of their cooperatives, while adhering to cooperative values and an ethic of service to smallholding coffee producers. This chapter follows the approach identified as methodological populism by Mosse and Lewis (Chapter 1, this volume), which shows (1) that hidden transcripts and practices underlie the public face of policy (Rossi, Chapter 2, this volume; Mosse 2004); (2) that actors are forced to bracket and manipulate identities (Heaton, Chapter 9, this volume); and (3) that disjunctures emerge between the agendas of different development actors (Salemink, Chapter 5, this volume). Brokering these tensions then requires compromise, translation, and negotiation (Desai, Chapter 8, this volume). In fair trade there is a discrepancy between the aim of building strong, successful organizations and the requirement agencies have for needy beneficiaries marginalized in conventional trade relations. The cooperative managers are forced to reconcile the aim of progress in development with the mission of developers to extirpate poverty. This dual mission and the contradictions within it are implicit in fair trade, which aims to establish transnational commerce “in such a way that disadvantaged producers can increase their control over their own future, have a fair and just return for their work, continuity of income and decent working and living conditions” (Fair Trade Federation 2000, cited in Raynolds 2002b). And this is achieved, according to TransFair USA, through “an innovative concept that connects producers and consumers in more equitable, more meaningful and more sustainable ways” (cited in Raynolds 2002a: 404). Despite this promise of a new kind of transnational relationship between growers and shoppers, there have been few attempts to document those relations or critically assess the possibilities of fair trade. For consumers it is good to imagine an alternative market in coffee whereby an extra payment can compensate for the disadvantages poor farmers suffer in conventional capitalist markets. To discover that this alternative ethical space is incorporated into the commercial strategies and practices of producer organizations is, perhaps, unsettling. In the final section I will suggest that this sense of unease stems from expectations and associations attached to the idea of fair trade, which can be explored through writings on the ideology and politics of the gift.

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Costa Rica, cooperatives, and coffee: meeting the development challenge In Costa Rica access to fair trade markets comes under the auspices of a consortium known as Coocafé.3 This second-level cooperative is presently made up of nine primary producer cooperatives who process and market the coffee cherries produced by their members and to varying degrees offer agricultural extension services, act as a conduit for credit, and engage in social and environmental programs. The Coocafé story begins in 1985, with the arrival in Costa Rica of the Agro-Economic Consultancy (CAE).4 The CAE aimed to establish “a regional project for economic development, which would support decentralization and encourage producer associations in the rural sector” (Orozco 1992: 20, my translation). The prominence of the cooperative movement in Costa Rican national life meant that these associations would be cooperatives.5 Also central to the CAE’s specifications was a requirement to work with small and marginalized farmers. The stated goal was “to make the life of peasants and their families, who have always been the most marginalized in our country, more bearable and decent, by generating employment and better incomes, with more just and egalitarian participation in decision making at both the economic and political level” (Orozco 1992: 22, my translation). Guanacaste, in the northwest of Costa Rica, met those conditions. In the words of one manager, “it was at that time one of the most marginalized and economically underdeveloped parts of the country.” The historical legacy of cheap land in that region had led to the concentration of vast tracts of the lowlands in the hands of a few families (Gudmundson 1983) coexisting with a large number of smallholding peasants in the highlands around the town of Tilarán, and in upland areas on the Nicoya Peninsular. It was this class of peasant-proprietor that the project aimed to help. The CAE established offices in Cañas, Guanacaste, and identified six suitable coffee cooperatives: Coopecerroazul, Coope Pilangosta, and the now defunct Coope Cenizosa on the Nicoya Peninsular; and Coopetila, Coopeldos, and Coope Montes de Oro in the Tilarán Highlands. All these cooperatives were deemed to meet the general criteria necessary for assistance: They were situated in peripheral areas with low levels of infrastructure and were composed of a membership base of small farmers. The CAE arranged a series of meetings between the managers of these organizations. They already knew each other as members of the Costa Rican Federation of Coffee Cooperatives (Fedecoop) but had failed to draw up a common agenda, because their interests were

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always subsumed under those of the larger cooperatives dominating the federation. Meeting as a group for the first time, the cooperatives realized that they faced similar issues. They had problems accumulating capital and accessing credit. They encountered difficulties in maintaining the quality and quantity of production because of outdated and inefficient processing machinery and because their members had failed to adopt the modern techniques that had transformed coffee production in other parts of the country (Hall 1991; Paige 1997; Williams 1994; Winson 1989). They all had problems marketing their product, so the prices received and passed on to their members were consistently below the national average. Finally, those running the organizations, drawn from among the ranks of local coffee producers and prominent figures in local life, were untrained in the arts of modern business and were unprepared to execute the program envisaged by the CAE. For this, professionally trained administrators and managers were required. Plans were drawn up and implemented to change the cooperatives from “traditional” organizations into “modern” ones, with a professional bureaucracy and trained staff, equal to the task of competing in the modern coffee industry. An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each cooperative was carried out, with management training provided to transform them. As well as making loans available from its own coffers, the CAE underwrote credit. Agricultural extension officers were appointed to improve production techniques and recruit new members. The regular meetings between management, technicians, and administrative staff at the CAE offices set in motion a common agenda and led to the formation of Coocafé. With a new administration in place, the members of Coocafé were in a position to begin to put the ideas and vision outlined in the CAE brief into practice. This required “vision” and “untiring struggle.” The first director of the CAE, Berthold Leimbach, was taken as representative of these qualities. He has been described as the “tireless instigator” and “the great director” of the project (Coocafé 1998). By positing a radical disjuncture with tradition, and putting progress in its place, the modernizers gathering under the Coocafé umbrella promoted a particular vision of the future; organizations such as Coopeldos operated under the motto “we sow progress” (sembramos progreso), whereas Coocafé could confidently proclaim their first ten years of operation was spent “harvesting success” (cosechando logros). Today Coocafé is a conglomerate of nine cooperatives, with its headquarters strategically located near the capital city. Over the years four

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other groups have joined the original founders. The new affiliates generally meet the conditions for membership; they are situated away from the principal coffee producing areas,6 and very few of their members have the ten hectares deemed by the Costa Rican Coffee Institute (Icafé) to be the minimum required for a family to make a living from coffee (Cubero 1998: 2).7 The new cooperatives in the group are linked historically through personal and professional ties and make distinctive contributions to Coocafé. Coopesanta Elena is situated by a national park and can project an ecological image. It has direct access to a lucrative tourist market for its own brand of coffee. Coope Llano Bonito is situated at an altitude in a prime coffee-producing area and provides the high-quality “hard bean” the group requires. Two of the new members, Coopabuena and Coope Llano Bonito, were independently inscribed in the fair trade register, and Coopesanta Elena has preferential agreements with North American coffee businesses. By absorbing these cooperatives, Coocafé has come to be the export agency for all fair trade coffee that leaves Costa Rica. Each cooperative that joins must invest a sum based upon average yearly production into Coocafé, which contributes to the increased income, financial strength, and overall stability of the group. The institutional and financial expansion of Coocafé has been remarkable. In the early days, despite their best efforts, these small cooperatives consistently failed to exercise influence, even within the national coffee cooperative federation (Fedecoop). Today they have links to, and representatives in, a wide range of government departments, cooperative organizations, financial institutions, export agencies, NGOs, and campaign groups. For example, one manager sits on the board of the national coffee institute (Icafé), which controls and regulates the industry. Other organizations, such as the Latin American Coffee Producers Solidarity Campaign (Frente de Cafetaleros Solidarios de Americá Latino), are more overtly political. By participating in regulative, financial, and lobbying groups, Coocafé has gained political influence and accesses sources of information and funding that would otherwise be unavailable. Coocafé has developed a bureaucratic structure to market the coffee. The export department handles the complicated arrangements for shipment. The aim is to sell exclusively through Coocafé, which acts as a channel for its affiliates. The export operation, they say, cuts out the need for intermediaries and streamlines the marketing process. In the year from 1997 to 1998, Coocafé increased the volume of exports

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through its export department by 101 percent, to reach 35,091 sacks, and the export value more than doubled.8 The cooperative managers and Coocafé staff are today professional business people and administrators. The offices are run on modern business lines. Close contact is maintained between individual cooperatives and the head office. Movements in coffee prices and export opportunities are closely monitored, as are political and organizational changes in the coffee industry. Weekly meetings are held to determine financial and political policy. Since no decision is taken without consideration and representation of the interests of the various member cooperatives, the process is deemed highly democratic as well as transparent; my own attendance at these business meetings was always seen as unproblematic. In any case, the ultimate reference point for policy is the membership base of producers, the small and marginalized coffee farmer. It is no surprise that the efforts of the Coocafé administration has led to financial growth. In the first five years of operation capital assets reached 50 million colones, but since 1992 the figure has increased by the same amount year on year. By the end of 1998, the total capital stood at 383 million colones, or almost US$1.5 million9 For managers, sustained growth is evidence that they know how to run the business in a prudent and businesslike manner.

Campaigning for farmers: political movements and moral motivations Successful in business, Coocafé managers are driven by political commitments. The establishment of the group itself required a spirit of “cooperation” and “solidarity,” and the work of individuals was geared toward improvement and service for the benefit of the small coffee farmer. The aim of harnessing individual creativity and putting it to work at the service of the many, under the rubric of progress, comes across clearly in the words of the then manager of Coocafé, in his tenth anniversary address: Ten years have passed since a group of men and women with a future vision came together with the purpose of resolving with valor and solid and practical plans, the problems of the small and marginal coffee producer. Ten

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years have gone by since a seed of hope was sown, on behalf of a life of dignity and sustainability for the small Costa Rican coffee farmer. A seed, which sprouted with vigor, grew strongly, and today has borne fruit in terms of competitiveness and solidarity in legitimate defense of the interests of the small and medium coffee producer of our country. (Coocafé 1998) According to the managers, this desire to defend others’ interests comes from formative personal experience often linked to cooperative values, but located in a particular Costa Rican national history and ideology. Here there is a close association between the smallholding peasant family farmer, living in a classless and harmonious rural society, and national identity. Although this representation has been challenged, particularly the dispersed settlement pattern and equality in poverty (Gudmundson 1986), it is alive and well in national discourse. The idea of a nation composed of small, independent yeoman farmers living from the land in peaceful co-existence provides a political model, both for the cooperative movement and the social-democratic welfare state for which the country is famous. The economic reforms and social guarantees that were put in place in the middle of the last century were the product of shared political interests. The property-owning peasantry, a rising urban middle class, and the Catholic Church were all concerned with suppressing the power of the coffee elite, but they also wished to outmaneuver political radicalism and the threat of communism that had emerged in the 1920s and 1930s (Paige 1997; Williams P. 1989; Williams R. 1994; Winson 1989). Although the Communists had initial success in politics, and even entered into an unlikely alliance with the Church over social reforms, they were soon suppressed and sidelined in the political process. The reformism that then emerged is heavily influenced by Catholic social doctrine,10 specifically the right to private property (particularly land); the centrality of the family in social life; the value of independence with priority of the individual over the state; the promotion of social justice based upon rights and duties of employees and employers; the role of the state in safeguarding property and protecting citizens particularly the poor; limitations on the accumulation of wealth and the dedication of excess to charity; and, finally, the desirability of benign associations for employers and working people, particularly Catholic groups. There is a remarkable similarity between the model of Costa Rican society that

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began to emerge in the 1940s and this Catholic doctrine, first laid out by Pope Leo XIII in his rerum novarum of 1893. One aim of the reformist movement was to head off social unrest and to curb the growing popularity and militancy of the Communist Party. But the values espoused in the social doctrine of the Church also reflect a concern about the effects of unbridled capitalism. To this end, the social doctrine proposes an intermediate position between the capitalist and Communist alternatives. Individual autonomy and the right to property are allowed, even celebrated, but the purpose of the economy is not to maximize individual accumulation but to serve a social purpose. In this, the Catholic doctrine proposes a model of the economy based upon reciprocal relations within and between families, and a doctrine of moderation and restraint with regard to wealth and material possessions. These themes are central to the moral ideas and purposes of the Coocafé managers. Thus Carlos Vargas, the present manager of the group, says that despite its name Costa Rica should really have been called “Costa Pobre” (“poor” rather than “rich coast”) since it is composed of “humble” landowning farmers, living on small family farms in shared poverty, which breeds “solidarity” and requires people to cooperate in adversity. In discussing their work and commitments, the managers frequently refer to a family background characterized by economic scarcity. Again, Carlos Vargas spoke of the challenges his parents faced raising twelve children but added that such a large family encourages sharing. Similarly, Juan Carlos, another manager, talked of the sacrifice his parents made, of periods of “financial crisis” and their “great struggle” to put himself and his four brothers and sisters through college and university. Both men are sons of coffee producers and regard the experience of growing up in relatively difficult economic conditions as highly formative. Alvaro Gomez, the manager at Coope Sarapiqui, like many of his colleagues, believes his motivation to help coffee farmers comes “from his father and his grandfather and his uncles,” all lifelong members of the cooperative. He says that people are either cooperativista11 or they are not; it is a “question of origins.” In short, the managers share and make explicit a common identity with producers, and most of them are themselves coffee farmers and deliver cherries to the cooperatives they manage. This, they say, allows them to empathize with the producers, to “share in their trials and tribulations.” Despite being raised in difficult economic circumstances in marginal areas of the country, the managers have had the opportunity to gain professional qualifications. This experience gives them a “personal goal” to

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use their advantages and skills in the service of the cooperative and the communities in which they work, helping others by increasing the return to producers for their coffee, and through involvement in a range of development programs. The managers combine the qualities of professionalism and efficiency with an ethic of service and adherence to cooperative and Catholic-style values. The growth of Coocafé is seen as a testament to their success. Inspiring the managers’ work is their association with the producer cooperatives that have played a crucial role in the national coffee industry since the 1960s. In fact, the political demands and unrest that precipitated the rise of cooperatives goes back much further to struggles between producers, on the one hand, and coffee processors and exporters, on the other, that were ongoing throughout the last century (Acuña Ortega 1985, 1987; González Ortega 1987). Conflict centered upon the terms and conditions of sale and the prices paid to producers by the coffee oligarchs who controlled the industrial and export sides of the business. Discontent led to mass rallies and political campaigns that peaked as the market fell in the 1930s and 1960s. Farmers and their representatives campaigned against what they portrayed as an unscrupulous and rapacious coffee elite that threatened their right to make a livelihood from the land, and hence undermined economic and political stability. Over the years, a series of political settlements were reached to regulate the coffee industry. They eventually came together under law 2762, which came into statute in 1961. Arguably the most important part of the legislation fixed the profits allowed from processing at 9 percent; in this respect it limited the exploitative power of the processors, while still not guaranteeing profits for growers selling their crop on the commodity markets. To this end, some politicians proposed policies that met the growers’ demands for guaranteed prices, effectively subsidies. These electoral promises were never fulfilled, however, and such a state-sponsored measure has never been introduced in the coffee sector. So it is clear that the minimum prices offered through fair trade addresses demands that have been on the political agenda for Costa Rican coffee farmers since at least the 1930s. In accessing and engaging with government agencies, NGOs, and fair trade outlets, the managers of Coocafé draw upon tradition; they act as representatives of small family-based producers, marginalized in politics and economically impoverished, and yet these same farmers have historically been considered central to the health and stability of the country. They are organized into democratic producer associations, as befits the Costa Rican way, but have problems in

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accessing markets and maintaining a livelihood. In promoting these features certain inequalities are obscured from view—those within the household, for example, and the fact that much of the coffee harvest is done by landless families, Nicaraguan migrant laborers, women, and children (Ortiz 1999; Sick 1999). Furthermore, as we shall see, anomalies emerge and relationships become strained when this representation becomes difficult to sustain in front of development agencies seeking beneficiaries.

Consolidation and growth: transnational connections and alternative trade Perhaps the greatest factor in the financial achievements of Coocafé is the access they have to markets through alternative trade organizations in the north, principally in western Europe, but increasingly in the United States. The arrival of fair trade in Costa Rica predates the CAE and Coocafé, and can be traced back to the activities of the Dutch NGO SOS Wereldhandel in the early 1990s.12 In May 1982 a representative of this organization arrived in Costa Rica looking for a suitable producer group with which to develop a relationship based upon preferential terms of trade. Members of the cooperative federation (Fedecoop) took him to the fifty-first Assembly of Coopecerroazul—a meeting that is now seen as historic, marking the beginning of fair trade in Costa Rica. Throughout the 1980s commerce between SOS Wereldhandel and Coopecerroazul remained constant at 750 sacks per year. With the establishment of Coocafé and the common agenda, other cooperatives in the group were given access to this trade, a decision that was deemed a “generous act” demonstrating a “lack of egotism” on the part of Coopecerroazul. A positive assessment of the role fair trade has played in the life of small farmers, the cooperative, and Coocafé itself came across clearly in an interview with Alvaro Gomez. In the period following the failure of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, fair trade is described as a “windfall” or “bargain” (una ganga). Prices on the international market fell to below US$100 for 46 kilograms, prompting a five-year crisis in the coffee industry, and many farmers cut down or abandoned their groves. At the same time structural adjustment under the neoliberal model imposed during the 1980s meant the withdrawal of state support for social welfare programs and the privatization of stateowned industries (Edelman 1999). Cooperatives and producer groups

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now had to compete on equal terms with private business. The cooperative sector suffered a crisis; some organizations went bankrupt. The fact that fair trade organizations pay a minimum of $121 when the market falls below that watershed, plus a $5 premium whatever the price, immunized the cooperatives of Coocafé against the worst ravages of declining prices and the shock of neoliberal policies. Some 70 percent of the extra payments go directly to the producer, and the bulk of the remainder is retained by the cooperative, held as a development fund (fondo de desarollo) under the auspices of Coocafé. This gives the group financial strength but allows the individual cooperatives access to resources. As a result they were able to consolidate their position and develop at a time when many others involved in coffee production and trade faced ruin. The rewards retained during the market lull were matched by social benefits. Because of the minimum price, farmers were able to continue their activities, maintain investment in production, and take out loans without fear of negative consequences. They were protected from market instability and able to remain on the land. In this respect fair trade is seen to counteract a long-term trend toward concentration in land ownership and the population drift from the rural to the urban sector; it is portrayed as a mechanism that maintained small producers and rural communities in difficult times. When prices are low, fair trade is said to achieve its purpose of providing stability and reliable incomes to vulnerable farmers engaged in production for unstable global markets. A rather more problematic situation emerges when prices rise above the $121 threshold, a clearer indication of fair trade as a business strategy. The system of a minimum price and the premium were developed during a market low and intended to offset the difficulties this situation presents. When coffee prices rise over the watershed, the minimum price no longer applies; all that then remains to differentiate the alternative and the conventional markets is the $5 premium. To further complicate matters, the spot price on the New York exchange acts only as a guide during the negotiation of sales. When the market is buoyant and coffee in demand, the managers can achieve prices on conventional markets that exceed the price offered by the fair trade organizations, even with the $5 premium. At such times, abiding by agreements to make future consignments to comply with fair trade agreements can be deeply problematic, especially since managers are aware that prices might fall once again. To complete future orders from the fair trade sector, and so maintain the relationship, can require them to reserve supplies in the silos and ignore good prices on

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the open market. Agreements to supply coffee to ethical consumers and the consequent advantage of a sustained minimum price as insurance during market lulls have to be balanced against a lack of freedom to speculate when coffee is in demand. The advantages of fair trade in a weak market, and the disadvantages when the market is good, can be illustrated by the competition and strategizing that takes place over participation in alternative trade agreements by the separate cooperatives in the Coocafé group. These negotiations are more intense when, as in June 1999, there is low confidence in the market and when there is competition to participate in attractive fair trade as prices fall. A number of systems of criteria for participation were fixed in meetings of the Coocafé Administrative Council: In the early years loyalty and scale of production were taken into consideration, in equal measure. This aimed to reward cooperatives that retained coffee for fair trade customers at times of high prices, but at the same time sought to distribute some of the advantages equally. Unfortunately, the system proved unsatisfactory. Coocafé still found difficulty in meeting orders from alternative trade organizations when prices rose, as cooperative managers sold off their stocks on the open market. In 1994 a decision was made to allocate quotas based on the participation of individual cooperatives during times of high prices, that is, loyalty. By 2003, and following further maneuvering, they settled upon a system that used three criteria: the scale of production of each cooperative (45 percent), loyalty in selling coffee through Coocafé (20 percent), and a fixed quota of participation for each cooperative to demonstrate “solidarity” (35 percent). On top of this there was an agreed ceiling on participation of 55 percent, although for many of the cooperatives in practice the quota is nearer to 30 percent. The maneuvering that occurs around participation shows how fair trade is incorporated into professional sales strategies and suggests a hiatus between the commercial and the ethical component. At least, the ethic of the managers is directed toward developing strategies to maximize prices they can pass on to their members, rather than exhibiting any higher-level commitment to alternative market channels. At any one point managers balance sales to alternative trade organizations against the advantages of the open market and attempt to argue their case and juggle participation accordingly. Similarly, the organizations in the north operate according to business norms. The clearest way to see this is through the issue of quality. The oversupply of coffee that has resulted in prices falling to a thirtyyear low (Gresser and Tickle 2002) means that buyers can afford to

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choose only the top-quality beans, whereas inferior grades remain unsold. As the current crisis continues, and with ever greater numbers of producer groups bidding for participation in fair trade markets, the alternative trade organizations are said to be more demanding in terms of quality. To some degree this is understandable. To be a commercial success requires a quality product, but the producer groups who face the greatest obstacles are not generally those producing high-quality coffee. The mission to help poor marginal farmers is compromised by commercial considerations.

When two models clash: relations between coffee cooperatives and fair trade organizations It might be tempting to attribute the success of Coocafé to fair trade, but the idea that local level development is directly due to fair trade is denied by the manager of Coopeldos. In his view the situation is the reverse: Involvement in fair trade is a result of development at the local and regional levels. Banishing tradition, the establishment of modern bureaucratic structures, setting up common agendas and networking, all opened up the possibility of expansion and facilitated access to preferential markets. For the brokers involved in administering cooperatives at the local and regional level, fair trade is a niche, an “alternative market” (mercado alternativo) they have managed to access on behalf of their members. Such has been the success of Coocafé, so the argument goes, that it no longer needs the preferential terms on offer. However, the managers deny this and vigorously defend their right to participate in fair trade deals in discussions with parties in Europe. They point out that to exclude them from fair trade would be a punishment for their own success. Their achievement has been possible because they operate in an environment of political stability, unlike their war-torn Central American neighbors, and to remove them from the fair trade register would in effect be a punishment for their country’s democratic and peaceful tradition. Further grounds for the right to participate relates to business acumen. By this argument Costa Rica cannot compete in terms of marginality and poverty with, for example, their Nicaraguan neighbors. However, they provide what the market requires: efficiency in dispatching consignments as and when ordered, coupled with the kind of quality product needed to improve the image of fair trade goods in the north. Coocafé is presented as a model that demonstrates the potential

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of the alternative trade system, and they have offered their services to other cooperative groups who may wish to emulate their success.13 Some managers, disquieted by the organization of fair trade, offer a more trenchant criticism of those who would exclude them. This focuses on two key areas: first, the limited scale of the alternative market and its slow rate of growth, and second, the nature of the relationship between producer groups and fair trade organizations in the north. We can put the effect of fair trade into perspective by looking at production figures and gate prices paid for coffee at one cooperative. For the year from 1999 to 2000, with prices at rock bottom, Coopeldos sold 26 percent of its coffee through alternative trade outlets, which allowed an increase in payments of just over 9 percent to the producer.14 According to Carlos Vargas at Coocafé, the primary effect of fair trade today is “psychological” rather than financial; it encourages producers to continue working and boosts morale. On a national scale, however, it has less importance. As Alvaro Gomez from Coope Sarapiqui pointed out, sales to alternative markets vary between 5 percent and 1 percent, depending on the country; “this is not sufficient to keep up people’s morale,” and at current prices the coffee industry in Costa Rica is not viable, since “producers are not receiving what they should for their coffee.” In Costa Rica, as in Europe, fair trade remains a niche market. Some managers put the limited effect of fair trade down to a failure to evolve—the “unending queue” of producer groups joining the system, and an inability to “project” and “plan” by the organizations in Europe, coupled with an “unwillingness to listen to producers.” Managers experience a range of relationships with their European partners, but several expressed concern that terms and conditions are dictated, and they are unsettled by the way in which they are constituted as subjects suitable for development. The goals they can express as leaders of their respective cooperative organizations at home are negated by their experiences when they meet with their northern partners. At conferences and on business trips they report dealing with more junior staff from alternative trade organizations. The higher managers only make cursory visits, signaling that the opinions of producers and their representatives are given little importance. This contrasted with the assemblies held by cooperatives, in which they aim for open debate and the exchange of opinions is encouraged, with policies determined by votes cast by all members. Certain parties in Europe want to deal only with poor farmers, managers say. One explained that he always takes visitors from alternative trade organizations to visit the poorest families because “they like to see that,

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and then they go away happy.” Similarly, managers claim that some fair trade groups expect acquiescent coffee farmers who will not question decisions taken abroad. This they relate to neocolonial attitudes, where Europeans “do not like to listen to the opinions of people in the Third World.” Others allude to the religious and Church background to fair trade. One interviewee claimed that some fair trade managers in Europe see themselves as “shepherds” and the producers as “their flock,” who should follow, be submissive, and not take initiative or pose questions. At the same time, it is admitted that the delegates from the south are often “passive” and afraid to challenge their European partners for fear that they might lose access to preferential trade outlets. From this perspective it would be easy to become overly critical and pessimistic, to resign oneself to the ubiquity of power and domination, and to dismiss fair trade as an exercise in governmentality.15 However, these experiences are at odds with the image projected by NGOs, businesses, and proponents of fair trade and the way it is imagined. It contradicts the stated purposes of the proponents of alternative trade with which this chapter began, and it does not allow for the positive assessments offered by managers. It is also contrary to the moral intentions of consumers. What is more, this ethical consumption is recognized by growers and cooperative staff alike, who state that alternative trade is borne of the “good will” and “solidarity” of consumers. To account for this discrepancy, I believe we need to take seriously the moral and political aspects of fair trade, acknowledge and even accentuate common ground between participants, but at the same time try to understand how and why it can be experienced as subjection.

Exploring the moral dimension: the ideology and politics of the gift Cooperative managers, in common with exponents of fair trade, express a commitment to coffee producers marginalized in conventional markets, which implies a socialist or social democratic politics of solidarity. Linked to this is a belief in alternative forms of economic organizations, above and beyond the individual actor in the market, and exemplified by producer associations and cooperatives. A further component is the commitment to help others—the desire to express selfless altruism— which has religious roots. Altruism is discernible in the Catholic social doctrine that underpins the Costa Rican welfare state, in the Church background of many alternative trade organizations in the north, in the

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motivations of managers to use their advantages to help others, as well as in consumers who by paying more offer a premium to producers. One way to tease out these political and ideological components, and to explore contradictions in fair trade, is through the concept of the gift. In his reading of “The Gift,” David Graeber (2001, 2004) examines Mauss’s most famous work as a political tract that locates acts of reciprocity as ethical spaces in the economy offering a mirror image to the self-interest of the market. Mauss’s involvement in socialist politics and the cooperative movement are illustrative of his political commitments (Graeber 2001: 156). Although, as Graeber notes, many cases of gift exchange require “balance” and therefore involve calculation, other cases veer toward an ideal of “total prestations” that aim to establish social relations—an expression of “timeless human commitment” through the giving of objects, without expectation of return (2001: 225).16 This interpretation of the gift depends upon an ideology of altruism. Although it must probably be accepted that giving without some return is not possible, this does not detract from an ideology that says it ought to be so, or deny the possibility of political action that operates on this premise.17 There are several possible explanations for the idea that the gift should be given without obligation, independent of whether or not this is logically possible. Jonathan Parry associates the idea of perfect giving, or rather the total alienability of gift from donor, with the renunciatory ethic of certain religions. The Indian gift of dana, for example, embodies the sins of the giver, which are passed on to the recipient, and should not therefore return (1986: 459–463). Gifts in this scenario are given in a spirit of expiation and sacrifice, so acts of charity come to have moral weight. For James Carrier the historical development of capitalism provides another explanation for the ideology of the gift. He identifies two separate domains, one glossed as “work,” in which interest and impersonal relations prevail, the other called “home,” an autonomous space where altruism rules (Carrier 1995: 152–156). David Graeber interprets Mauss in a similar though more political vein, since for him gifts act as a means to create social relations, the model for which are the open-ended, altruistic relations between families, particular individuals, clans, and the like (2001: 27, 159). In the supermarket, jars of fair trade coffee stand alongside other commodities of similar ilk, but remain distinct from them. One distinction lies in the premium, paid voluntarily by consumers who could equally well choose a different brand.18 This payment is justified in terms of a commitment to the producer and a more meaningful relationship between them and the consumer. Although the motivation to con-

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sume fair trade products is undoubtedly complex, and is beyond the competence of this chapter, it does seem that the purchase choice is freely made and the relationship is constituted as devoid of the obligation to reciprocate. In common with other acts of gifting, fair trade seeks to establish an ethical space outside the market; it denies self-interest and acknowledges, even privileges, social relationships in the economy and paradigmatically those between producer and consumer. Since the model for altruism in Western thought is the family, it seems entirely fitting that recipients of fair trade are small family farmers. Because the Catholic and cooperative model is based upon individuals sharing private property in reciprocal relationships, it is also apt that they are landowners. The idea that gifts should be given without expectation of return can, and apparently does, obscure many problems. Graeber points out that it can easily degenerate into relations of patronage and exploitation. For Stirrat and Henkel a similar obfuscation occurs in the charitable giving they associate with development: [W]hat starts off as a pure gift, an act of seemingly disinterested giving, morally and ethically divorced from the mundane world, becomes in the end an object or a service intimately entwined in the mundane and interested world. Furthermore, in the course of this journey, the gift creates a series of problematic relations, frequently ambiguous in terms of their meaning and often paradoxical in terms of their implications. (Henkel and Stirrat 2001: 69) The experience of cooperative managers poses similar problems for fair trade and highlights some of the difficulties in establishing nonmarket-type relations in a market context; on the other hand, the desire for an alternative relationship between producer and consumer has ideological appeal and potential for political leverage.

Conclusion The experience of cooperative managers as they engage with fair trade involves them in a paradox. This can be summarized as a tension between two essential aspects of development: the desire to promote welfare, coupled with the imperative for technical and economic progress. Olivier de Sardan labels these the “altruist paradigm” and

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the “modernist paradigm” (2005: 70). For cooperative managers, engagement with fair trade comes from business acumen, efficiency, and success in engaging with commodity markets on behalf of their members. At the same time, they reject the paternalism by which consumers can be encouraged to adopt poor southern farmers. For their part, alternative trade organizations in Europe have problems with successful producer groups, since they contradict the model of marginality and poverty, that is, the need to express concern and political commitment that attracts consumers to fair trade in the first place. Populism assumes a commonality of purposes, ideas, and representations, but the evidence shows that there are disjunctures in the meanings and aspirations of the participants that threaten the fair trade relationship. As policy, fair trade has met with some success by providing an avenue for consumers to give a premium to producers exposed to the vagaries of commodity markets. Fair trade indicates that the idea of greater social responsibility, realized by drawing producer and consumer into closer commercial relationships, can be good business practice for both producer groups and northern organizations. It disavows the notion that consumers take only price into consideration while shopping and seek solely to maximize self-interest. Although I have shown that as policy fair trade does not operate as envisaged, it is at least implementable. Fair trade opens up moral, economic, and political possibilities in development, and as David Mosse has argued (2004), from ethnography we can begin to see how policies take shape in practice.

Notes 1. Early work on fair trade took the exploitative nature of conventional trade relations as its point of departure, and presented it as an alternative, positive paradigm (Barratt-Brown 1990; Coote 1992). More recent approaches emphasize globalization, producer and consumer networks, “connectivity,” and the sharing of meaning (Whatmore and Thorne 1997; Renard 1999; Raynolds 2002a). A series of useful sociological case studies of producer groups is available at http:// www.colostate.edu/Depts/Sociology. For Costa Rica, Ronchi (2002) provides an in-depth study of Coocafé as an institution. The optimistic tone of these accounts is not always shared by studies of alternative trading relationships on the ground (Fraser 2003; Mutersbaugh 2002; Tallontire 2000), or research that identifies

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

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possible contradictions between the ethical and business components of fair trade (Lewis 1998; Renard 1999, 2003). I gratefully acknowledge funding for doctoral research from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and further generous support by the British Academy for fieldwork in 2003. Consortium of Cooperatives of Guanacaste and Montes de Oro. The CAE was organized and funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a wing of the West German Social Democratic Party. The importance of cooperatives is enshrined in legislation, and today there are over three hundred cooperatives in the country (El Cooperador 1998: 1) including as much as 30 percent of the economically active population (Edelman 1999: 59). Approximately 40 percent of coffee processing takes place at cooperatively owned beneficios (Fedecoop 1998: 3). For an in-depth account of the emergence of coffee cooperatives in Costa Rica, see Cazanga (1987). Except Coope Llano Bonito, which is in a prime coffee area. Total production from 10 hectares should yield in excess of 200 fanegas (1 fanega = 400 liters) by volume of unprocessed cherries; data supplied by Coocafé shows that only about 10 percent of cooperative members produce this amount, and the average production for all asociados is only about 23 fanegas per year, or one tenth of the quantity required to support a family. Despite some anomalies in the data, the maxim that Coocafé is composed of marginal cooperatives made up of small farmers largely holds true. Figures supplied by Coocafé. Coocafé; Asamblea General de Delegados No. 11, December 1998. The first architect of social reform and social guarantees in Costa Rica was Rafael Calderón Guardia, president from 1940 to 1944, who had a “solid Catholic upbringing” and “declared that his government would be oriented by the doctrine of social Christianity” (Williams 1989: 109). A cooperative supporter, or one who displays and supports cooperative values. Information on the origin of fair trade in Costa Rica comes from interviews with the manager of Coopecerroazul, Sr. William Zuñiga, as well as the collection of documents put together by that organization: Informe Sobre Relación S.O.S. y el Mercado Alternativo. Coopecerroazul, 1982–1990. Such exchanges are in any case ongoing and are part of the regional forums, delegations, and fact-finding missions in which the cooperatives engage.

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14. Source: Coopeldos, Memoria Anual 2002, Asamblea Ordinaria No. 44, March 1, 2003. 15. This critical perspective would then place fair trade in the same bracket as other forms of “deconstructed development”—nothing more than an operation of power that Homi Bhabha has called the “neo-colonial tradition of political control through philanthropy—a celebrated missionary position” (1994: 242). 16. This interpretation follows Graeber’s definition of the gift as “to transfer something without any immediate return, or guarantee that there will ever be one” (2001: 225). 17. Derrida points out that the ideology of the gift, given without interest or expectation of return, constitutes a paradox for the economy based as it is upon exchange, and hence circulation. Hence the gift becomes “the impossible”; it attempts to break the circle and deny the idea of return, which is the essence of the “law” of economy (1992: 6–7; see also Graeber 2001: 161 for commentary). 18. The voluntary nature of participation in fair trade consumption is made explicit in a recent poster campaign with the headline: “Trust Your Taste: Choose Fair Trade.”

References Acuña Ortega, V.H. 1985. Clases sociales y conflicto social en la economía cafetelera costarricense: Productores contra beneficiadores 1921–1936. Revista de Historia, numero especial. Acuña Ortega, V.H. 1987. La ideología de los pequeños y medianos productores cafateleros costarricenses, 1900–1961. Revista de Historia 16:137–159. Barratt-Brown, M. 1990. Fair trade: Reform and realities in the international trading system. London: Zed Books. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Carrier, J. 1995. Gifts and commodities: Exchange and Western capitalism since 1700. London: Routledge. Cazanga, J. 1987. Las cooperativas de caficulturas en Costa Rica. Editorial Alma Mater. San José: Universidad de Costa Rica. Coocafé. 1998. Memoria 1988–1998. Coocafé: Costa Rica. Coote, B. 1992. The trade trap: Poverty and the global commodity markets. York, UK: Oxfam Publications. Cubero, G. Rojas 1998. Modelo de costos de producción de café. San José, Costa Rica: Icafé.

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Derrida, J. 1992. Given time: 1. Counterfeit money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, M. 1999. Peasants against globalization: Rural social movements in Costa Rica. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. El Cooperador. 1998. Nuestro movimiento cooperativo crece con fuerza y se diversifica. Epoca II(LVIII). Fedecoop. 1998. Informe de la Gerencia General. Asamblea General Ordinaria No. 90. Fraser, J. 2003. The coffee crisis and fair trade in Nicaragua: Practices of livelihood and survival in rural Jinotega. Unpublished MSc dissertation, Waningen University. González Ortega, A. 1987. El discurso oficial de los Pequeños y Medianos Cafeteleros (1920–1940, 1950–1961). Revista de Historia 16:161–191. Graeber, D. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave. Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an anarchist anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Gresser, C., and S. Tickle. 2002. Mugged: Poverty in your coffee cup. Oxford, UK: Oxfam International. Gudmundson, L. 1983. Peasant movements and the transition to agrarian capitalism: Freeholding versus hacienda peasantries and agrarian reform in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, 1880–1935. Peasant Studies 3(3). Gudmundson, L. 1986. Costa Rica before coffee: Society and economy on the eve of the export boom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hall, C. 1991. El café y el desarollo histórico-geográfico de Costa Rica, 2nd ed. San José: Editorial Costa Rica. Henkel, H., and R. Stirrat. 2001. Participation as spiritual duty, empowerment as secular subjection. In Participation: The new tyranny? edited by B. Cooke and U. Kothari. London: Zed Books, pp. 168–184. Lewis, D. 1998. Non-governmental organizations, business and the management of ambiguity: Case studies of “fair trade” from Nepal and Bangladesh. Nonprofit Management and Leadership 9(2):135–151. Mosse, D. 2004. Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and practice. Development and Change 35(4):639–671. Mutersbaugh, T. 2002. The number is the beast: A political economy of organic-coffee certification and producer unionism. Environment and Planning 34:1165–1184. Olivier de Sardan, J.P. 2005. Anthropology and development: Understanding contemporary social change. London: Zed Books.

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Orozco, J. 1992. La consultoría agro-económica: Un proyecto de la fes. In Siete años . . . por el desarollo campesino, edited by J. Martinez. Cañas, Guanacaste, Costa Rica: Consultoría Agro-Económica, pp. 19–34. Ortiz, S. 1999. Harvesting coffee, bargaining wages: Rural labour markets in Colombia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Paige, J. 1997. Coffee and power: Revolution and the rise of democracy in Central America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parry, J. 1986. The gift, the Indian gift, and the “Indian gift.” Man 21:453–473. Raynolds, L. 2002a. Producer consumer links in fair trade coffee networks. Sociologia Ruralis 42(4):404–424. Raynolds, L. 2002b. Poverty alleviation through participation in fair trade coffee networks: Existing research and critical issues. Fair Trade Research Group, http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Sociology. Renard, M.C. 1999. The interstices of globalization: The example of fair trade coffee. Sociologia Ruralis 39(4):484–500. Renard, M.C. 2003. Fair trade: Quality, market and conventions. Journal of Rural Studies 19:87–96. Ronchi, L. 2002. The impact of fair trade on producers and their organisations: A case study with Coocafé in Costa Rica. PRUS Working Paper No. 11, University of Sussex. Sick, D. 1999. Farmers of the golden bean: Costa Rican households and the global coffee economy. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Tallontire, A. 2000. Partnerships in fair trade: Reflections from a case study of Cafédirect. Development and Practice 10(2):166–177. Whatmore, S., and L. Thorne. 1997. Nourishing networks: Alternative geographies of food. In Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring, edited by M. Watts and D. Goodman. New York: Routledge, pp. 287–304. Williams, P. 1989. The Catholic Church and politics in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Williams, R. 1994. States and social evolution: Coffee and the rise of national governments in Central America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Winson, A. 1989. Coffee and democracy in modern Costa Rica. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

SEVEN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN A NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION

Revealing Strategic Translations through an Embedded Tale

Wiebe Nauta

Introduction The study of NGOs in development presents many hurdles for social scientists. Mosse and Lewis (Chapter 1, this volume) have characterized anthropological involvement with development “as instrumental, as populist or as deconstructivist” and while for some this may seem exaggerated, it nevertheless suggests serious shortcomings within much of the literature on NGOs in development. Typical NGO literature is largely produced by insiders, has an activist flavor, presents simple solutions for complicated development dilemmas, depends heavily on jargon, and perpetuates many myths about NGOs (Nauta 2004: 41–42). In these myths, NGOs emerge as independent, value-driven, participatory, and accountable and nonprofit in nature. This NGO literature clearly has both instrumental and populist characteristics. By instrumental, I refer to the fact that anthropologists and other academics may have been incorporated through being hired by NGOs or donors to produce a public relations type literature (see, e.g., Fowler 1991, 1997; Bratton 1990; Edwards and Hulme 1992). The distinction between “insiders” (NGO staff, activists, academics employed by the NGO sector) and “outsiders” (disinterested parties whose analyses involve independent academic research) remains unclear, clouding critical understanding of such organizations. As Quarles van Ufford has argued, 149

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Definitions of development are vital “symbolic capital,” which is carefully tended by the agencies. These “analyses” should not be seen as equivalent to a disinterested, scientific analysis. (1993: 140) Moreover, analyses by “incorporated academics” may have populist characteristics that present difficulties when presented as neutral “scientific analysis.” As a way forward, and building on deconstructivist traditions, I propose to produce an embedded tale (Nauta 2004: 11). Such an effort does not involve easy simplifications but rather aims to describe the dynamic processes NGOs are involved in by (re-)introducing the historical, political, and socioeconomic dimensions into the analysis. Of course, it has long been recognized by scholars such as Long and Long that interventions are always part of a chain or flow of events located within the broader framework of activities of the state and the actions of different interest groups in civil society. (1992: 228) Without a comprehensive understanding of such wider context, detailed studies or “thick” descriptions may appear disembodied and easily become irrelevant. An embedded tale—in this case focusing on the Monti Rural Association (MRA)—involves an ethnographic and actororiented approach that does not overlook historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts. It then becomes possible to explore more critically what I have called the myths about NGOs and to begin to transcend normative accounts. Influenced by Ferguson’s (1990) work I begin with an exploration of the wider context in the form of the “communities” with which the MRA became involved. Second, so as to get to grips with “development” and the role played by an organization, I look at the “internal history” of the NGO and show that this reveals a lot about the ideal-typical descriptions of NGOs that are normally (re-)produced in the NGO literature. A third and crucial element is ethnographic fieldwork in an organization based on participant observation, interviews, and informal conversations, which helps to unravel contemporary development processes. Such work reveals how networks function and are managed, what role “relationships” play, how intervention practices are shaped, and the manner in which the “reported reality” may differ from the situation “on the

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ground.” This chapter also illustrates the benefits of ethnographic fieldwork in communities when the NGO is absent, since much can be discovered about development through exploring absence and relative “silence.”

The Monti Rural Association The MRA was established in Grahamstown in 1982.1 It was set up by progressive academics as they concluded the Surplus People Project (SPP), a countrywide South African research initiative to study forced removals2 in the 1970s and 1980s. The MRA aimed to support “communities” that had been removed, or remained under threat of removal, in the Eastern Cape3 (see Map 7.1). During the heyday of apartheid, members of staff were shadowed, arrested, and even tortured. From an organization largely run by volunteers, the NGO grew in the 1990s to become a leading development actor in the Eastern Cape, where it specialized in issues related to land and rural development. During the South African transition period to democracy, it moved to the city of East London and cooperated, as a professional development organization, with the new government. It aided the newly formed government structures and institutions in formulating and implementing post-apartheid land reform policies. However, what started as exciting and fruitful cooperative arrangements with the government, after several years became rather problematic for land sector NGOs. The government seduced large numbers of NGO staff to work for the state, causing a true NGO sector “brain drain.” Moreover, as the government increasingly adopted a market-oriented ideology after 1996, the MRA and other NGOs slowly retreated to their original civil society niche. This led to a period of mild estrangement. The 1990s, further, saw a spectacular rise in (foreign) donor support to the MRA, which at the end of the decade came under threat as donors indicated that, in their view, the South African transformation had come to a conclusion, and they would rather support the now legitimate government institutions. It led to a reorientation of the MRA, whereby it changed its focus and become engaged in more market-oriented activities.

The wider context of an NGO To understand the wider context, one must first become acquainted with the “communities”4 with which the MRA has been involved in

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Map 7.1 The Eastern Cape during apartheid.

Source: Adapted from Ramphele (1991: 40).

from its inception. One cannot ignore the “community” of Thornhill, since its history “is the history of the Monti Rural Association, and vice versa” (Nauta 2001: 120). During the SPP, Thornhill—one of the areas that concerned Grahamstown academics became involved with—was regarded as a dumping ground for relocated people from Herschel, in the middle of nowhere in the former Ciskei:5 “these non-dwellings look as if they are at the end of the world, on land like the back of the moon” (SPP 1983b: 224). The thousands of “refugees” who arrived in the area in the course of 1976 did not find the houses, schools, and clinics that they were promised.6 The situation remained alarming for many years since people were in dire need of basic infrastructure and

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services. So when MRA was established, its focus remained on the community of Thornhill for a long time. And this involvement later led to the recruitment of several active Thornhill residents as MRA volunteers and staff members, which added to the shared history and intensified cooperation between “the community” and the NGO. Now, Thornhill community dynamics are themselves linked to the history of forced removals and the establishment of the Bantustans, and this wider context has to be taken into account in order to avoid a distorted view of the developmental role of the MRA. What then does this “embedded tale” yield? What has been discovered that would otherwise have remained hidden? First, the history of Thornhill showed that the early developments—like the establishment of Thornhill itself—and the early leadership struggles in the “community” had everything to do with the wider struggle for political power in the emerging Ciskei (Manona 1980; Switzer 1993). To be precise, the competition for authoritarian leadership of the Ciskei, ultimately won by Lennox Sebe, also played a role in the establishment of Thornhill. The three chiefs that moved from Herschel to Thornhill all became Sebe supporters and received seats in the Ciskei Legislative Assembly. Also, as one writer (Anonymous 1989)7 has argued, ethnicity was invented by Lennox Sebe to win the elections. In this example of decentralized despotism (Mamdani 1996), the scramble for political power and scarce resources was shown to play a major role. Second, the research revealed that the early work of MRA is intertwined with the overall struggle against the apartheid regime and coopted Bantustan leaders (Nauta 2004). In fact—and this was never evident in the reports, archives, or official minutes of the NGO—some early staff members were discovered to have been underground African National Congress (ANC) operatives in the 1980s. Their aims were, thus, not only informed by the plight of victims of forced removals, land issues in the Eastern Cape, academic interests, and the mission statement of MRA but also by the political necessity to get the rural masses organized. Thus, the active support given by MRA staff to more progressive forces in communities, especially aiding the establishment of residents associations that opposed the Tribal Authorities, which were linked to oppressive Bantustan governance structures, was a conscious strategy to fight apartheid. Thus, a more (party-) politically charged history of MRA was uncovered. Third, this study of NGO action in a community with which it shared a history demonstrated the political dimension of interventions that involved the support of certain groups and the opposition of others. In

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the case of Thornhill, the intervention history of MRA shows that the NGO backed the youth and more democratically inclined groups for over two decades, while at the same time it actively opposed the proBantustan and pro–Tribal Authority forces. Such interventions have left scars that can negatively impact present and future interventions by the NGO. Old resentments in the “community” may thus complicate development processes. Even if such interventions nowadays are in large part technical, the fact that they are carried out by an NGO that used to be for some and against others can negatively impact the chances of development success. Fourth, in the case of Thornhill, a historical perspective yields a more concrete answer to the question of why the people moved from Herschel to the resettlement camp in Thornhill. In the official (NGO) version, people left Herschel to escape incorporation in the Transkei, since they feared losing their South African citizenship, which was beneficial for finding (and keeping) work in South Africa. This view mainly portrays the people as “victims.” However, the research revealed that thousands of people voluntarily left Herschel because there was a lack of land due to erosion and overcrowding in the district (Bundy 1988). This reason was never mentioned in the NGO reports and analyses, but was discovered during the ethnographic fieldwork and archival work. In fact, this struggle for land and resources, entwined with struggles for political power in the Ciskei, provided a key to explain many of the fights between “community” factions that complicated and even impeded NGO development interventions over the past two decades.

Tracing an NGO’s struggle with “development” and “delivery” Besides taking into account the wider context, an embedded tale also involves delving into the “internal” history of an organization. In the NGO literature, ideal-typical descriptions abound. For example, Howes and Sattar (1992) somewhat uncritically refer to three consecutive stages of so-called learning curves that were developed by Korten (1984: 183–184): the first, learning to be effective; the second, learning to be efficient; and the third, learning to expand. In each stage a learning curve is depicted that rises sharply over time to a maximum and subsequently falls slightly to become more or less constant. In the process the organization first becomes effective, then efficient, and, finally, learns to expand. Thus, it is predicted that NGO performance rises

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from a low at inception to a level somewhat below maximum at maturity. It is an early description of NGOs as learning organizations in which error is treated as an essential source of information . . . in the context of lessons learned and corrective actions being attempted. (Korten 1984: 185) Although Korten himself indicates that “in reality [this] may be a very disorderly and intuitive process” (184), Howes and Sattar seem to adopt the model less critically. My archival and field research suggests another perspective in which NGOs instead struggle with their roles in development, with as much unlearned as there is learned, with periods of progression followed by regression, and where there is little or no indication that NGOs ever follow a straightforward evolutionary path. With the MRA it became clear that it has both learned and unlearned many lessons with regard to its role in development. The question of whether to focus on intermediary roles or to “dirty its hands” in projects and service delivery has haunted the MRA since inception. Several times it firmly announced the end of its role in service delivery, only to return to just that some months later.

Early delivery experiments I will begin this discussion in the 1980s when the MRA8 became engaged in a political struggle to counter the influence of the apartheid state. I have described this period as the struggle era (see Box 7.1). Since the South African regime took new initiatives to (re-)gain control over the “black spot communities,”9 “development” was placed more prominently on the NGO agenda. According to the MRA newsletter,10 the Department of Development Aid budgeted “a R12,5 million ‘upgrading’ program for the seven corridor communities” (1988b: 6). This South African government department was set up to assist poor black people living in South Africa and its “foreign countries”—read Bantustans. However, this was not about charity but about supporting Tribal Authorities that collaborated with the Bantustan governments. According to the MRA, “Government moves to upgrade come packaged with an attempt to set up a local authority sympathetic to the government and willing to carry out government instructions” (1988b: 6). So at an MRA meeting in 1987 it was decided: (1) “to make available information and expertise on the strategies of the state”; and

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Box 7.1 Beyond apartheid and post-apartheid The scheme “apartheid” and “post-apartheid” is inadequate to analyze the role of the “progressive forces” in South Africa, as it ignores the transition period. Instead, I distinguish three (partly overlapping) eras: 1. The struggle era (1980s) The progressive forces—NGOs and activists—are engaged in a “struggle” against the apartheid regime. 2. The freedom and consultation era (1993–1996) The transition period in which the progressive forces enter legitimate politics and a coalition emerges between state institutions, civil society, and political organizations. It begins with an agreement on an Interim Constitution (December 1993), while a leading document is the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP; ANC 1994). 3. The new realism era (post-1996) The Rainbow Coalition falls apart as the National Party (NP) withdraws after accomplishing the negotiations about the constitution; important element: the property clause. The NP no longer aligns itself with progressive politics. The remaining alliance tackles world market challenges with a new macroeconomic strategy: the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) program, criticized as South Africa’s structural adjustment program (Department of Finance 1998).

(2) “[t]o help strengthen communities in their negotiations, and to help introduce democratically elected bodies, and to develop alternative development strategies.”11 Furthermore, it was firmly stated that the MRA would only play an intermediary role in development:

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MRA will not get involved in setting up the projects. [The r]ole [is] more to help communities to come to understanding of what they are able to do.12 However, as awareness grew that the state might (re-)gain control of the border communities by dishing out resources, the organization—as part of a counterstrategy and as gatekeeper of resources—could not resist supporting democratic groupings in their material needs. The MRA thus eventually set foot on a slippery slope of project implementation. For example, in early 1988 it donated a brick-making machine to Kwelera because the Residents Association planned to build a preschool. Yet it soon became apparent that no progress was achieved since no bricks were produced. Frustrated by this, MRA staff felt the “need to put pressure on Kwelera to use their machine.”13 But, strangely, in the same meeting that recorded this, others suggested that pig farming could also be beneficial to the communities and that MRA needed “to acquire a boar on a cooperative basis.” For some, this all went too far: In our initial discussions it was decided that MRA would never be responsible for projects, that MRA is just a facilitator. Are we still doing this? (MRA 1988b) Although this question was never really resolved, and the initial experience of getting into delivery was not particularly positive, the MRA continued through “trial and error” in the same manner, motivated both by the desire to oppose the state and “to do something for the people.”

“Traumatic” delivery experiences in Gallawater A During the mid-1990s freedom and consultation era, the MRA stepped up its delivery-oriented interventions, while remaining ambivalent about them. A major intervention took place in Gallawater A (Map 7.1), a white-owned farm that was invaded by residents of Zweledinga, a dumping ground similar to Thornhill. Already under the old apartheid government, policy changes were introduced14 to aid black communities to purchase white farms. A substantial government subsidy of 80 percent of the purchase price could be accessed, while the community would have to pay a 5 percent deposit. The remaining 15 percent could

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be repaid over a five-year period. Because this seemed to be an ideal solution to break the deadlock over the farm invasion, the MRA and a legal NGO assisted the Zweledinga Residents Association (ZRA) in the process. By 1995 a deal was completed whereby 102 families, together paying a R37,000 deposit, could begin to settle on the farm. Since this was one of the first instances in South African history where a group of black people took over a white farm, the first democratically chosen Minister of Land Affairs attended the celebrations and addressed the people: The country . . . is watching communities like Zweledinga, which are taking ownership of former white-owned land. . . . I believe that you could be a living testimony as to what can be done once people are given the opportunity. (MRA 1996a: 1) This put pressure on the MRA to ensure a success story in a period when the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) came to guide government and NGO policies and actions in the new South Africa (ANC 1994).15 As a result the organization adapted its position regarding concrete development interventions, noting in the Monti Rural Association Proposal 1994–1997 that “demand-driven reconstruction accords with the process of democratization precisely because it provides an incentive for local initiative and participation” (MRA 1994: 8). The organization still had reservations: “While not an implementing agency, MRA believes that, through its Development Support Program, it can make a valuable and important contribution to this process of development and reconstruction in the region” (MRA 1994: 39). But these reservations were disregarded in strategic decisions to hire an agricultural officer in 1994 to strengthen the Development Support Team and employ a New Zealand volunteer skilled in rural resource management as a project manager. This paved the way for more concrete development projects. In 1995 the MRA successfully applied for funds through the New Zealand High Commission to initiate poultry projects in Gallawater A and other areas. Establishing a women’s poultry project was considered beneficial to the settlers from a food supply and financial point of view. Moreover, income generation would help the settlers repay 15 percent of the purchase price that was still owed. The plan of a women’s project was consistent with the MRA goal of giving women a stronger role in devel-

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opment (MRA 1994: 16). Last, of course, the poultry project idea aligned with the aim of the MRA to bolster rural reconstruction (MRA 1994: 16). However, the poultry project, and all other development initiatives in Gallawater A, eventually became a great disappointment. To summarize the details, the settlement of the farm by 102 intended beneficiaries never materialized. Only a few families arrived, and the “big men,” active in the trust, mainly used the land to graze private cattle. Furthermore, strife broke out between several factions in the trust over the mismanagement of funds. Although for many years the MRA remained involved, the NGO ultimately failed to resolve the situation. And as the fear grew that men would force the women to use the poultry money for other purposes, the MRA eventually refused to transfer the poultry project funds to the Gallawater A account. In 1998, bruised by conflict, the MRA officially pulled out of the community. Thus, instead of becoming the “living testimony as to what can be done” envisaged by the Minister of Land Affairs, Gallawater A became a notorious failure by a renowned NGO. Although land had been successfully transferred, mainly due to MRA, the next phase, involving the introduction of scarce resources, only exacerbated already problematic “community” dynamics. Yet this would not be the last time that the temptation of delivery proved irresistible. In Gasela, similar mistakes were repeated shedding doubt on the idea of organizational learning so often professed by the NGO sector.

Ethnographic fieldwork reveals an NGO engaged in strategic translations Having spent nine months with the MRA accompanying staff on field trips and attending dynamic workshops, meetings, and other interactions, I decided to give my fieldwork a new impulse (and avoid the NGO “workshop bias”) by spending time in “communities” independent (and in the absence) of the NGO. From this perspective, the present section focuses on the intermediary character of an NGO and, again, illustrates the difficulty of getting involved in delivery—this time in the new realism era. I will take the case of Gasela to illustrate the complicated position of an intermediary organization. On the one hand, the organization deals with the “community,” while on the other the NGO depends on government departments that hold many of the trump cards of development. The staff members of the MRA have to manage this tension while also taking into account the NGO mission statement and resources, the latter being partly determined by donors.

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In this process NGOs engage in strategic translations using the three essential tools: research, workshops, and reports.

Background Gasela farm is located on the border of the former Ciskei (see Map 7.1). It is situated between the road and the railway and was once called Mooifontein. In 1980 Bantustan consolidation designated the railway line as an “international border.” Thus, one part of the farm was incorporated into the Ciskei, while the part between the road and the railway remained in South Africa. For many years the South African state used the farm as a base in South Africa to “aid and develop” areas in the Ciskei, where victims of forced removals were relocated. In the early 1990s, as the Bantustan era was ending, the white staff and skilled black staff were transferred to East London. However, the original Gasela farm workers, some of whom had lived and worked on the farm for decades, and a few more recent arrivals aimed to stay but were eventually threatened with eviction. Things got progressively worse when a white caretaker was placed on the farm whose harsh actions left deep scars. The MRA was brought in to assist the farm worker community in its struggle against this caretaker, who was eventually removed altogether in 1996. According to the MRA’s figures, Gasela includes fifty-two settlement sites, of which only thirty are occupied by 218 residents,16 mostly ex–farm workers (MRA 1997: 11). On the farm, a neglected colonial-style redroofed farmhouse is enclosed by a prison-like barbed wire fence and surrounded by a scattering of small huts with small subsistence-like gardens. There is no sign of stock keeping or intensive agriculture on the fertile land. Apart from a broken-down tractor and an old diesel water pump, all farm implements seem to have vanished. Walking around, as social scientist and agricultural scientist, one wonders why the MRA has described it as a potentially thriving agri-village. Initially, the MRA tried to ensure the transfer of land to the Gasela residents through the Land Restitution Program.17 When this failed, it was expected that the Land Redistribution Program—designed to transfer white-owned land to the black majority on a willing-buyer, willing-seller18 basis—would yield the desired result. Because the South African state owned the farm, and no white farmer had to be compensated, the MRA argued in its Gasela Proposal to the Department of Land Affairs (MRA 1996: 8) that

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in line with DLA’s stated priority of redistribution of state land, MRA proposes that Portion 1 of the farm Mooifontein be granted to the Gasela community and that settlement subsidies and the option of purchasing an additional portion of land be made available to them. . . . MRA proposes that Gasela be treated as a pilot project for the establishment of an agricultural settlement which aims to meet the food requirements of the community as well as provide a cash income which provides residents with a livelihood. MRA insisted that “the Gasela community is a stable and cohesive community who want a rural lifestyle where their main source of income is agriculture” (MRA 1996: 9). Following this submission to the provincial Department of Land Affairs (DLA), it became clear that the director of DLA was not convinced that the Gasela community had the capacity and resources to farm successfully. Second, a Stutterheim District plan was in the making that included settlement options for the wider region, and it was unclear whether this left room for small autonomous agri-villages such as Gasela. Nevertheless, DLA postponed a hard decision, because the district plan would take several years to complete, and the Gasela residents acquired rights to stay on the land under the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act.19 As a compromise, MRA was awarded another research contract to prove their case. It yielded the Report on Gasela in November 1997 (MRA 1997), which, although more realistic in regard to the problem of the lack of agricultural skills, was rather technocratic and focused on positive physical agricultural production factors. In this manner MRA was convinced that it had reinforced its main recommendation that “Gasela should be swiftly transferred to its residents” (MRA 1997: 28). Sadly, the DLA did not fundamentally alter its position after it received this new report. However, the department did explain that the community could start cultivating the land in order to demonstrate their eagerness and ability to farm. In November 1997 MRA conveyed the message that a final decision by the DLA would take cultivation success into account to the Gasela residents. Why was it, then, that almost a year later the land had not been cultivated? My fieldwork yielded several answers that, unfortunately, cannot here be discussed in all their ethnographic detail.20 However, several interrelated factors can be mentioned: a lack of resources (money, implements,

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labor) and management skills; negative past experiences with a common project; and a leadership vacuum and tensions among various people. Most frequent among the explanations given by the Gasela farm dwellers for not cultivating the land was insufficient cash to hire a tractor. Six thousand Rand for 10 hectares is a very large sum for a group of impoverished rural dwellers, even if shared between thirty families. Second, the time of plowing was a complicating factor. Not only were the available tractors in the area busy on other fields during the plowing season, but also the community members lacked time during the week. Work in the fields could mainly be done at the weekend or in evenings. This suggests, as a third factor, problems surrounding labor, especially during activity peaks. These factors were exacerbated by what I would term a “culture of dependency” and a lack of management skills on the part of these ex–farm workers. Planning, commercial instinct, and analytic ability were weakly developed in people who had always been in highly dependent positions. They tended to look for help from outsiders when confronted with problems. There was also the difficulty of managing a common resource captured in Hardin’s (1968) classic article “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Why invest personal time, energy, money, or other resources in managing a common resource when others, who invested less, will also reap the benefits? This problem was explicitly illustrated by one of the residents who explained why people were hesitant to use their own cattle: People don’t want to use animals to plough, because it makes the cattle weak and makes the meat not nice. . . . Also, I can’t give the community my cow, if someone else uses it, they can hit it and push it so hard it can die. Investing scarce private resources was not popular in Gasela. In fact, I discovered the residents already had some negative experience with a communal women’s project. To my surprise, this project, at the back of the farmhouse, was never mentioned in any of the MRA reports about Gasela. It turned out that women had received some training and had been given resources through the ANC Women’s League. However, conflicts broke out over access to these resources, over the reluctance of some women to make a small contribution in cash and leadership. The women’s project not only illustrates tragedy of the common problems relevant to the (non-)cultivation of the farm’s large fields, but it also points to another problem: weak leadership.

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Although the list of community organizations established from 1993—such as the ANC youth league, the ANC Women’s League, the ANC “proper,” the Gasela Residents Association (GRA), the Crèche Committee, the Water Committee, and the Police Community Forum—seems impressive, most of these were rather inactive and ineffective. In fact, during my fieldwork it became apparent that a leadership vacuum existed after the first elected chairperson of the GRA retired in 1996 because of a severe illness. His successor was too authoritarian and was voted out of office in 1997, and his replacement, the first woman chair, was far from vocal on the important issues. This led to a relatively impotent residents association, which was rather problematic in the light of the development issues that were faced. Even though the combination of these factors severely limited the potential for commercial agriculture, the MRA strategy to secure the transfer of the land to the ex–farm workers still focused only on the agrivillage option. Why?

Strategic translations Three reasons can be distinguished for the focus on the agri-village option. First, the NGO’s main interest was to secure the transfer of the land to the residents of Gasela, and to a certain extent it did not matter how this was achieved. Second, the NGO staff believed that only the economic viability argument—clearly part of the government’s new realism discourse—could win over the DLA. Third, the organization needed to regain lost prestige, especially due to the Gallawater A debacle, by conducting technologically sophisticated research. Thus, the MRA engaged in strategic translations—managing the tension between what the community wanted, the parameters set by DLA, and its own mission statement—to convince DLA to transfer the land: “We’re going for a major showdown with the Department of Land Affairs around Gasela.”21 This “showdown” involved fighting the department on its own turf and in its own terms, whereby “economic viability” became the defining notion. In this way, the government’s “new realism discourse” also permeated the work of the MRA, and “hard science” became the political instrument. In the process the NGO consciously moved away from the “soft” type of research it had conducted in the past, and the plight of the ex–farm workers was reduced to the pragmatic concern with transfer of the land. For the time being it suited the MRA politically to ignore the

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“social reality in the field” and to focus on deploying its three “tools of translation”: research, workshops, and reports.

Research Although it is clear that research in any context should be critically evaluated, one should be especially vigilant in contexts where actors stand to gain from the results. Although many NGOs engage in research enveloped in the scientific-academic format or discourse, it frequently has an activist purpose. This was clearly illustrated when the director of MRA criticized me for approaching a (different) research topic too academically: “We are setting a precedent with this . . . enquiry. MRA has political objectives. . . . Our research is not neutral research, we need particular types of information.” This was also the case in Gasela. Instead of trying to come to grips with the management and farming capabilities of the “community,” the NGO focused strategically on the economic and physical intricacies of the plan. This technocratic and (pseudo-)scientific approach, stressing agricultural production factors, concluded that if 20 hectares is allocated to cabbages and 20 hectares to potatoes then the resulting estimated annual gross margin will be R32,097,40022 per annum. . . . It is clear that the transfer of agricultural land to the Gasela community will lead to a substantial improvement in their quality of life. In very hard, material term[s], if one divides the projected cash flow by the number of extended households, then each extended household will benefit by approximately R10 000 per annum. (MRA 1997: 25) In addition, MRA made use of images of the Gasela residents as rural agricultural producers. In much of southern Africa such images are used by the development industry to justify agricultural development interventions. Rural residents with decades of experience in the cash economy and an urban outlook are represented as “traditional farmers” (see Ferguson 1990 on Lesotho). The persistence of such images is related to widespread convictions that Africans are still close to nature, and “traditionalism” is prevalent. However, in my conversations and interviews with Gasela residents, it emerged that most men and women had worked and lived all over South Africa to secure a cash income

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(Nauta 2004: 149). These were not traditional farmers but a rurally rooted proletariat (Bank 1997).

Workshops The second tool of translation, workshops conducted by MRA in Gasela, were also instrumental in portraying Gasela as a potentially thriving agri-village. As Pottier has argued, “participatory workshops remain structured encounters marked by hidden agendas and strategic maneuvers” (1997: 221). In fact, these standardized interactions between NGOs and their beneficiaries frequently take this form. Participatory workshops are usually lively happenings in which information is gathered and disseminated, and provide numerous opportunities for strategic translations by an NGO. Demands or opinions of people have to be recorded, interpreted, translated and relayed, for example, to the relevant government departments, as is illustrated by the Gasela workshop of November 20, 1997. The MRA was able to use its discretion to “consult” the community about certain topics, while strategically ignoring others. In the workshop, the NGO staff discussed the results of the research project in Gasela with community members and presented its land-use proposals for commercial vegetable production. It was attended by 53 people (31 women and 22 men) out of 218 residents. First, the MRA staff presented their technically and economically inspired research findings, followed by land-use proposals that emphasized commercial cabbage and potato production (MRA 1997). Subsequently, community members were asked to break up into three “commissions”23—the men, the women, and the youth—to discuss the research findings and land-use options. The men showed preference for both livestock farming and commercial crops. With regard to livestock, they preferred cattle only (usually their responsibility) above mixed livestock, including smaller domestic animals. The women also preferred crop farming and livestock. However, they identified beans as a cash crop and were also eager to grow subsistence crops like maize, sweet potatoes, and spinach. The youth favored crop farming only, especially cash crops such as potatoes and cabbages in addition to a few subsistence crops. Furthermore, they explicitly expressed that livestock should not be an option. Despite these differences, in the concluding session of the workshop the MRA agriculturalist in his speech concluded,

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so, the option that we presented is all right. You’ve indicated that you want more crops, which I think is good. We’ll incorporate your ideas into the final report, which will then be presented to DLA. If they like it and agree that you can farm, then we’ll recommend to DLA that the land is transferred to the community. Although it was not indicated how the opinion of Gasela residents would be incorporated in the report, the overall conclusion seemed to be that the community simply endorsed the MRA plans. This was also reflected in the 1997 report, where it was rephrased as follows: The whole community are in favor of MRA’s research findings. Crop farming is the top priority as it will alleviate poverty in the area. In particular, crops such as cabbages and potatoes are seen as a realistic option. (MRA 1997: 33) It is a clear example of how NGO workers are able to translate the position taken by members of the community in a manner that suits the strategies of their organizations. In this case, two issues were left out: what to do with livestock and how to incorporate a larger diversity of crops. Ignoring the livestock issue, especially, can cause major problems during the implementation of the project, since livestock, and particularly cattle, constitute a significant part of the cultural fabric of society. And the failure explicitly to discuss the fate of livestock kept by the most influential male community members in Gasela could certainly lead to major conflicts. Yet at no stage during the workshop did any MRA member make it crystal clear that a choice for commercial vegetable production would automatically imply doing away with most cattle. However, only five days later, in a meeting on November 25, 1997, with the DLA and the Department of Agriculture—and without any community members present—MRA staff stated that “people will not keep livestock, but it is not clear how they are going to get rid of the livestock that is present.” This led a government official to remark, “Don’t force your view on the community!” to which a prominent MRA staff member replied, “We won’t, we believe in a participative process.”

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Reports A third tool necessary for intermediary NGOs in the process of strategic translation are the reports produced by these organizations. In cases such as Gasela, where the government institutions have little or no autonomous contact with communities, the reports prepared by an NGO can become a crucial link in the chain. In fact, the reports to communicate with government agencies or donors, are equivalent to the workshops to communicate with “the field.” A report is a locus of interaction in which NGOs have the opportunity to present their version of reality. In combination with the carefully scripted, translated, and reinterpreted results of workshops, these reports become important tools of strategic translation in political processes. Within certain limits, NGOs can paint a picture of the situation at grass roots, and the situation in government circles. As was shown in the beginning of this chapter, although the MRA acknowledged the lack of skills and problems surrounding management capacity, the NGO was able to stress the hard “technical facts” about soils, crops, and climate in their aim to convince DLA that a land transfer would be the responsible thing to do. Reports are a necessary strategic translation tool without which NGOs are bound to fail in their political battles. Of course, there is often a clear disjuncture between the “reported reality” and the situation encountered in the field. Research undertaken by NGOs therefore needs to be assessed even more critically than the average academic project. What is shown is not necessarily what is. NGOs are able to reinterpret, adapt, and modify the information that travels “upward” from the field and “downward” from the government. In the process, so-called participatory workshops can easily be reduced to plays that are being enacted, having been carefully scripted in advance. The outcome is highly influenced by the NGO scriptwriters and can be recorded in the NGO reports, the third tool of translation. Although it may ultimately ensure the transfer of the land, the terms under which such a transfer takes place will determine whether the land will actually become an asset or a liability.24

Conclusion An embedded tale combines insight into the wider historical, political, and socioeconomic context, while at the same time using ethnographic methods to produce a “thick description” of what goes on locally. This chapter has shown how being aware of South African history, and

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specifically the history of Bantustans and relocated “communities,” is crucial when we aim to understand and analyze a “modern-day” land-sector NGO. As was shown, the MRA cannot be adequately understood without taking the history of the Thornhill “community” into account. Moreover, archival research producing the “internal” history of an organization can improve our understanding of how land-sector NGOs repeatedly struggle with their development role. The same development questions and decisions have haunted the MRA throughout its existence. “Getting into delivery” or focusing on intermediary work was a dilemma that affected many of the MRA development decisions over the past twenty years. Sadly, most experiments of “getting into delivery” proved to be problematic, and sometimes disastrous. Successive interventions in Kwelera, Gallawater A, and Gasela all suggest that the popular idea among NGO scholars, that NGOs are learning organizations, needs serious reexamination. Much is “unlearned” or simply forgotten. Moreover, NGOs do not follow ideal-typical evolutionary paths, since periods of regression are as much part of organizational history as periods of progression. Ethnographic fieldwork, both in the organization and in “communities,” proved to be a crucial instrument in coming to grips with the NGO as a development actor. Although such multilevel, multisite, and multivocal research is demanding in terms of manpower, it clearly shows that NGOs make use of their intermediary position to engage in what I have termed strategic translations. In the process, NGOs make use of three tools of translation: research, workshops, and reports. In some development settings, NGOs may actually create disjunctures by controlling the messages that are relayed from “grass roots” to government and vice versa. In the case of Gasela, this involved attempting to paint a picture of a farm inhabited by “a rural proletariat” as a potentially thriving agri-village in order to secure the transfer of land to the residents. As was argued, one can question the viability of such a commercially tainted option, but as the NGO became entangled in the government’s market-oriented embrace, it saw no other option. An embedded tale can help us to analyze and describe such modern-day development dilemmas, in which various illusions about NGOs—as independent, valuedriven, participatory, accountable, and nonprofit in nature—can be debunked.

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Notes 1. The MRA is a pseudonym. Initially it was named Albany Resettlement Association (ARA), which was changed to Albany Rural Association (ARA) in 1983 (also pseudonyms). In 1993 it became the MRA. 2. The SPP was established in 1980 by concerned South African academics who aimed to “co-ordinate and initiate research projects into population relocation in South Africa” (SPP 1983a: xix). Crucial was the aim of informing the world about the 3.5 million people that had been forcefully removed from their land since 1960 and those who were still under threat. 3. In the 1980s what is now known as the Eastern Cape consisted of part of the Cape Province and two Bantustans: Transkei and Ciskei. 4. I use the term “communities” as it is an actor term. However, these are not harmonious entities since disagreement and power struggles are all part of “community life.” 5. The Ciskei became an “independent”—not internationally recognized—homeland in 1981 after ceding the districts of Herschel and Glen Grey to the Transkei and receiving (promises of) large tracts of white farmland that consolidated the Ciskei geographically. In the process tens of thousands of people arrived in resettlement or transit camps in the Ciskei. 6. Much had been promised to the people of Herschel who contemplated the move to Thornhill: 4.(b) Area of resettlement shall be prepared in a way to attract and comfort the wishful occupants. (c) The infrastructure e.g. Schools, Clinics et cetera would be ready prior to resettlement. (d) Houses would be ready. (Proceedings of Meetings Regarding the Excision of Glen Grey and Herschel, April 24–25, 1975, East London; MRA Archives, 3) However, on arrival in an area overgrown with thorn bushes, nothing was provided except tents, and too few of them. 7. The fact that academic authors were afraid to publish under their own names illustrates the oppression in the 1980s. 8. Although it was known as ARA in the early years, to prevent confusion here I use the name MRA.

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9. “Black spot communities” were areas in “white” South African territory that were populated by black people who had secure legal tenure rights but were nevertheless under threat of forced removal. 10. Albany Rural Association. 1988b. Albany Rural Association Newsletter, 10. 11. MRA Minutes 24.02.88. 12. MRA Minutes 24.02.88. 13. MRA Minutes 24.08.88. 14. The Provision of Certain Land for Settlement Act No. 126 of 1993. 15. Initially, the RDP was the guiding document for the Rainbow Coalition, building one million low-cost houses in the first term of government, for example. Many targets were not met. 16. Some live in places such as Johannesburg or Cape Town for part of the year. 17. The Land Reform Program consisted of three pillars: restitution, redistribution, and tenure reform. 18. Africans could access land sold by “white” commercial farmers, using a settlement subsidy of R1,500 per household. By pooling resources in Communal Property Associations (CPAs), households could buy one commercial farm. 19. Act 31 of 1996 protected people with informal land rights from evictions during the period from 1996 to 1998, when new legislation was drafted. 20. For details see Nauta (2004a). 21. Strategic planning meeting of the Land Rights Unit, 3/11/97. 22. Approximately $55,000. 23. Of course, the decision to break into gender and age groups can itself influence the outcome. 24. In my communications with the MRA in 2001, it emerged that the Gasela residents had successfully started farming the land. However, when I visited the community in 2002, it became clear that the plowing had been organized and paid for by the MRA.

References African National Congress (ANC). 1994. The reconstruction and development programme: a policy framework. Johannesburg: Umanyano Publications. Anonymous. 1989. Ethnicity and pseudo-ethnicity in the Ciskei. In The creation of tribalism in southern Africa, edited by L. Vail. London: James Currey, pp. 395–414.

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Bank, L. 1997. Town and country: Urbanisation and migration. SA Labour Bulletin 21(4, August):20–26. Bratton, M. 1990. Non-governmental organizations in Africa: Can they influence policy? Development and Change 21:87–118. Bundy, C. 1988. The rise and fall of the South African peasantry, 2nd ed. Cape Town: David Philip. Department of Finance. 1998. Growth, employment and redistribution: A macro-economic strategy. http://www.polity.org.za/govdocsa/ policy/growth.html. Ferguson, James. 1990. The anti-politics machine: Development, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fowler, A. 1991. The role of NGOs in changing state-society relations: Perspectives from eastern and southern Africa. Development Policy Review 9:53–84. Fowler, A. 1997. Striking a balance. London: Earthscan. Edwards, M., and D. Hulme. 1992. Making a difference: NGOs and development in a changing world. London: Earthscan. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162:1243–1248. Howes, M., and M.G. Sattar. 1992. Bigger and better? Scaling-up strategies pursued by BRAC 1972–1991. In Making a difference: NGOs and development in a changing world, edited by M. Edwards and D. Hulme. London: Earthscan, pp. 99–111. Korten, D. 1984. Social learning and the nature of planning. In Peoplecentered development: Contributions toward theory and planning frameworks, edited by D.C. Korten and R. Klauss. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Long, N., and A. Long, eds. 1992. Battlefields of knowledge. London: Routledge. Mamdani, M. 1996. Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Manona. 1980. Ethnic relations in the Ciskei. In Ciskei: Economics and politics of dependence in a South African homeland, edited by N. Charton. London: Croom Helm, pp. 97–122. Nauta, W. 2001. The implications of freedom: The changing role of land sector NGOs. Ph.D. dissertation. Amsterdam: de Vrije Universiteit. Nauta, W.W. 2004. The implications of freedom: The changing role of land sector NGOs in a transforming South Africa. Münster: Lit Verlag. Pottier, J. 1997. Towards an ethnography of participatory appraisal and research. In Discourses of development: Anthropological perspectives, edited by R.D. Grillo and R.L. Stirrat. Oxford: Berg, pp. 203–229.

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Quarles van Ufford, P. 1993. Knowledge and ignorance in the practices of development policy. In An anthropological critique of development, edited by M. Hobart. London: Routledge, 135–161. Ramphele, M., ed. 1993. Restoring the land: Environment and change in post-apartheid South Africa. London: Panos Institute. Switzer, L. 1993. Power and resistance in an African society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the making of South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Surplus People Project (SPP). 1983a. Forced removals in South Africa: The SPP reports, vol. 1, General Overview. Cape Town: Surplus People Project. Surplus People Project (SPP). 1983b. Forced removals in South Africa: The SPP reports, vol. 2, The Eastern Cape. Cape Town: Surplus People Project.

MRA reports and archival sources Albany Resettlement Association. 1983. Albany Resettlement Association Newsletter, No. 1. Grahamstown: ARA. Albany Rural Association. 1983. Albany Rural Association Newsletter, No. 2. Grahamstown: ARA. Albany Rural Association. 1985a. Albany Rural Association Newsletter, No. 3. Grahamstown: ARA. Albany Rural Association. 1985b. Albany Rural Association Chairperson’s Report 1984. Grahamstown: ARA. Albany Rural Association. 1988a. Albany Rural Association Newsletter, No. 9. Grahamstown: ARA. Albany Rural Association. 1988b. Albany Rural Association Newsletter. No. 10, Grahamstown: ARA. Albany Rural Association. 1988c. Albany Rural Association Newsletter, No. 11. Grahamstown: ARA. Monti Rural Association (MRA). 1994. Monti Rural Association proposal 1994–1997, East London: Monti Rural Association. MRA. 1996a. Groundwork, Vol. 4, No. 1. East London: Monti Rural Association. MRA. 1996b. Gasela, proposal to the Department of Land Affairs. East London: Monti Rural Association. MRA. 1997. Report on Gasela November 1997. East London: Monti Rural Association. Proceedings of Meetings Regarding the Excision of Glen Grey and Herschel: April 24 and 25, 1975. East London: Monti Rural Association Archives.

EIGHT INSIDE OUT: RATIONALIZING PRACTICES AND REPRESENTATIONS IN AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

Bina Desai Among anthropological studies of development, there is very little ethnography that explores how organizations actually work. This chapter seeks to contribute to filling this gap through examining the social dimension of knowledge and its role in the formation of identities of individuals and organizations.1 It argues that actor-oriented analyses of organizational cultures in international development can be enriched by ideas from social studies of science. The focus of such studies, such as the laboratory studies of the 1980s, lies on the social construction of knowledge. A shift from the common concept of “knowledge as system” to understanding “knowledge as process” enables us to analyze organizations, their culture and relationships, from within. In agricultural service provision, and in agricultural extension in particular, knowledge is a vital determinant of social relationships and organizational cultures. While transferring technology (“scientific knowledge”) to farmers, agricultural extension agents experience how practice (“local knowledge”), in villages and within organizations, transforms not only “what they do” but also “who they are.” Actors produce knowledge, and knowledge makes actors: The extension agents’ professional identities are directly linked to knowledge. Rationalizing their actions, they can strategically employ certain knowledges and identities while moving between organization and village. Knowledge also becomes an essential resource in ongoing negotiations among “strategic groups” within organizations as well as between them. It is important to understand the process of how conflicting perspectives within an organization are turned into consensus when presented to an outsider. The representation of daily practice has 173

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to be worked into stories of success. This selling of dissent as consent, I argue, takes place—and should be analyzed—on different levels: in research, where scientific disputes are presented to the extensionists as unanimous findings and recommendations; in extension organizations, where approaches are sold to donors in a coherent and straightforward manner; and on the level of extension staff in the field, presenting their often contradictory practices as in line with preset targets and guidelines.

The social construction of knowledge and knowledge as process Although it has been almost ninety years since the idea of a relation between (scientific) knowledge and the social order in which it was developed was first presented (see Knorr Cetina 1981),2 this insight rarely features in the practices of development agencies. Agencies involved in agricultural development seem to be even more immune to change, which is perhaps not surprising. Operating with a concept of knowledge that is based on stark dichotomies and upholds the neutrality of science, agricultural extension enters into a relationship with “knowledge production” as a prolonged arm of research. As a consequence it creates a market for knowledge and its products and thus becomes a link to “knowledge consumption.” As research develops into a totalizing system, agricultural extension is affected by this process of systematization and institutionalization. There is the assumption of an absence of knowledge “out there” that can and must be addressed through a technocratic transfer of scientific knowledge. Despite various attempts to counter technocratic approaches, such as farming systems research (FSR),3 the ongoing process of “epistemization,” of valuing knowledge according to its facility to be placed within a rigid cognitive system, excludes many local practices and actually establishes an ideology of extension. In official discourses of development in India, agricultural knowledge is seen as an entity, a neutral product that can be accumulated or treated as a commodity, independent of its producer. It is purely cognitive and adheres to principles of rationality and reason. As a consequence there is a clear separation between knowledge and its holder. Implied here is a dichotomy between science and practice in which knowledge is an equivalent to information. In the realm of science, universities, research institutes, and consulting agencies are “factories of knowledge” (Fabriken des Wissens, Evers and Weingart 1999), producing

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knowledge that is transferred or sold to other production units (Stone 1997). Such a commoditization of knowledge involves, for example, turning locally available public knowledge into marketable private expert knowledge through consultancy. In this chapter, knowledge is understood not as “neutral” but as part of a power field that is continually transformed and redefined by ongoing discourses and hegemonies. As Bruno Latour writes, we should not forget “the many people who carry [ideas and technologies] from hand to hand”; we should turn toward the networks and translation processes that form the arena in which these ideas are moved about (Latour 1987: 133). This continuous work from within takes place at social interfaces that are closely linked to space and, in spite of obvious hegemonic dynamics, produce pluralities that should not be ignored. In this sense, knowledge is to be seen as a set of practices. This means that a study of agricultural extension must consider the historical and social environment it operates in. Further, knowledge employed in extension practice is subject to manifold power relations. Competing interests within and beyond the extension organizations have to be balanced through strategic negotiation. Thus, agricultural extension is a manifestation of relations of the different agents involved. Concepts and ideas from recent approaches in the anthropology of knowledge in general, and the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in particular, are helpful: These have been applied successfully in many areas but have not, until now, been made use of for the study of agricultural development.4 The laboratory studies of 1980s social studies of science provide interesting insights into the processes of scientific knowledge generation and consolidation (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Pickering 1984, 1993; Traweek 1988). I found that they were rather similar to those of the agricultural research and extension organizations I studied. Ethnographic approaches from the beginning of the 1990s until today, and their ethnomethodological, reflexive, and actor-network perspectives guide my own approach to studying the different public and private organizations involved in agricultural extension in India. Good examples are Karin Knorr Cetina’s work on financial institutions (1999) and Michael Callon’s study on the fishermen in northern Brittany, France (1986). The laboratory studies are useful not only in that they show how the design of an experiment (or project or demonstration site) determines its results but also, more importantly, that the practices and technologies available to the scientist and the extensionist heavily influence its layout in the first place.5 Agricultural projects and specific program activities

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on the ground are determined by individual and organizational rationales. These rationales are in turn shaped by practices that are adapted to local contexts. The rationales and practices can often be diverse and even conflicting. In this sense, the field work of an extensionist, the adaptive research of a scientist, and the actual policy formulation of a program are a matter of what is “actually happening” as opposed to what is “supposed to happen.” At the same time, this must not mean that the local practices contradict the official representations of a project or render it a failure (see Mosse 1997) but that they can actually uphold the logic of a project and make it a success in itself. The daily reality of extension service provision can be compared to what Pickering has called the “mangle of practice” in the context of laboratory science (1993)6. With this concept of “the mangle,” Pickering offers a new approach to science and the unpredictability of change that comes with it. He considers various factors—natural, social, technological, and conceptual—that influence the process of scientific knowledge production and sees them as “mangling” together in ways that are not foreseeable to the scientist but are shaped instead by time, space, and culture. Pickering uses case studies from particle physics, and later from mathematics and technology, in industries to show how the notion of an open and changeable science in process can make us understand better the workings of science in the past and today. Following him I apply such a perspective to the reality of agricultural extension as the prolonged arm of agricultural science. As Pickering himself stated recently, we need to move away from the “representational idiom” of science that leaves us only with epistemology and toward a “performative idiom,” an ontology of processes (Pickering 2002). Extension workers, just like scientists, have to deal with practical “resistances” and have to rationalize their actions, bring them into line with guidelines and targets, and at the same time maintain relationships of trust with the community members they work with. Thus they have to respond to practical problems, such as challenging agroclimatic conditions, as well as different expectations, “accommodating” them within situational rationales. In this context therefore, “resistance” is used purely in the sense of a practical obstacle, whereas “accommodations” are the responses to such resistances (Pickering 1993). For example, donor expectations that translate into changes of an organization’s targets or program outlines can also prove to be such practical obstacles in that they may confront the field-worker with the need to adapt either his activities and approaches of knowledge transmission or the ways in which he rationalizes and talks about them. This option of “manipulating”

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reports, of “tinkering” with obstacles and results (Knorr Cetina 1999) is an important factor and will be discussed in more detail later. It should have become clear by now that in looking at agricultural extension through the lens of the “mangle of practice,” the notion of knowledge that I employ is one of knowledge as practice and process. And yet, in the context of scientific processes and also in development discourse, knowledge is still often perceived as an entity, as a product or element, that can be generated and isolated. Knowledge is described as something to be accumulated, produced, transferred, or distributed. Karl Popper influenced generations of social scientists with an interest in the analysis of (scientific) knowledge by focusing on a “growth of knowledge” that “can be studied best by studying the growth of scientific knowledge” (1959: 15). He differentiates between ordinary or common-sense knowledge on the one hand and scientific knowledge on the other. However, the latter merely presents an “extension” of the former, since “the most important way in which common-sense knowledge grows is, precisely, by turning into scientific knowledge” (Popper 1959: 18–19). In official agricultural research and extension discourse in India, too, scientific knowledge is still depicted as an integrated whole, as a “system” of a higher order than can be known or experienced by an individual. This was reflected in the popularity of post-Independence “diffusion studies” that examined agricultural innovations as information that could diffuse into a community. Innovations were knowledge that was either adapted or rejected according to recordable factors. Seen in this way, knowledge gains value in itself and can thus be seen as detached from its holder. In this process, the holder retreats into the background while the information itself becomes the focus of analysis and research. As Piers Vitebsky writes, “knowledgeability becomes less of an attribute, knowing becomes less of an action and knowledge becomes more of a thing in itself” (1993: 105). As such it can be commoditized and once detached from its actor becomes a matter of interest to local and global “players” in the market and in science as well as subject to legal disputes.

Identity and knowledge in agricultural extension Extension workers’ professional identities are linked to various aspects of their social lives, including their self-identities and relationships, within the organization as well as in the larger professional and social

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context. The complexity of their professional identity is closely linked to the question of trust. In their daily interactions with farmers, ensuring the sustainability of relationships based on trust and mutual reliance is crucial. Within extension organizations, the extensionists’ achievements in this regard are difficult for their superiors to assess. Therefore, from the perspective of field staff, they are not adequately acknowledged. Extension work in the government service is only measured in terms of targets of demonstration plots and distributed mini-kits. Even in NGOs, there is a heavy reliance on targets and productivity in spite of claims to more holistic and inclusive approaches. In contrast to this, most extension personnel, including senior officers, appreciate the need for a more holistic approach to the complex situation of farmers. In the absence of specific guidelines to refer to, statements on the needed qualifications and characteristics of an agricultural supervisor (AS)7 include aspects such as the ability to build trust. Many extension workers talked about “being the friend (doost) of the farmer” or of waiting until “he believes me” (mujhe vishvaas deta hai: lit. “he gives me belief”). Even though in Hindi trust and belief were used semantically indistinct, the causal relationship was that “the one who is trusted will be believed.” This trust and thus belief is usually acquired by time and “proof” through “successful” demonstrations. But there is more to the process of establishing relationships and trust among farming communities, and it can prove to be difficult even with successful demonstrations or useful advice backing up the extension worker’s authority and legitimization. The main problem seems to be that farmers are often wary of the motivations of field staff: They see that the extension worker’s livelihood is not dependent on the outcome of the crop. Therefore the validity of his or her information is low in comparison, for example, to what a neighboring farmer, who also relies on the success of the crop for a living, says and does (Shekara 2001). The long-term relationships that farmers have with dealers are likewise often more important and trustworthy to a farmer because they know that the dealer depends on his sales and will not jeopardize a good relationship by selling low-quality goods to customers. Extension workers often get frustrated when confronted with the wariness of farmers to trusting them: They think we only do this for our salary and so our information is not necessarily the best or right. (Agricultural Supervisor, Jhunjhunu District)

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The fact that the extension worker only offers advice detached from inputs and that his living is not directly linked to his performance in the field and with that to the livelihood of the farmers proves problematic. Fairhead and others (2002) report analogous problems in forest programs in Trinidad, where it is the employed woodworkers who “question the motives of foresters, perceiving their arguments about conservation and sustainability as a ‘greenwash’ to hide their real political-economic interests” (2002: 81), namely to develop good relations with large sawmill operators. Similarly, farmers were sometimes suspicious about the extension workers relationships with fertilizer and pesticide dealers in the area.8 Farmers, in many cases, also see government extension workers as direct “arms” of the state. There is much cynicism regarding the ability of the state to produce regulative frameworks and implement them effectively. The legitimacy of government employees becomes intricately connected to these problems. A lack of trust in an extensionist’s competence is the result. During the time of my research, the lack of reliable power supply was one of the main issues affecting farmers daily lives and influencing their attitude toward government officials. Almost daily, local newspapers featured articles about farmers protesting against irregular power supply, privatization debacles in the power sector, and price hikes in power tariffs. Local political leaders regularly took on the “power” theme in order to gain new voters while others had to appear at rallies and meetings in order to not lose support. In this climate, it was difficult for public extension agents to convince the communities of their independence and neutrality in relation to these issues. Problems of legitimacy and communication due to restricted interaction, competition, and mutual distrust are enhanced by another factor: time. The government extensionists I talked to were fully aware of the large time span that is needed for the introduction of new technologies.9 The frequent delays in distribution of new varieties result in farmers and NGO staff distrusting public service providers in general and the local supervisors in particular. If, in addition, the relevance of the new technology is questionable for the majority of farmers in a specific area, it can be very difficult for field staff to maintain a certain level of respect among the village community. There is a general problem with the time it takes to see results in agricultural development. This is particularly difficult for NGO staff members who have to regularly legitimize their work to both donors and village communities. The time problem is accelerated by long and discontinuous communication channels. Of course, there is very rarely a direct link between the

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farmer and the scientist, and this chain is elongated further by intermediate figures such as field staff and Assistant Agricultural Officers (AAOs), NGO workers, and private agents. The Indian Centre for Agricultural Research (ICAR) has therefore tried out frontline demonstration schemes, where scientists directly conduct field and demonstration trials with the farmers and consequently have direct contact with them. But such schemes face the usual problems of scale and sustainability. When analyzing my fieldwork data, it became clear to me that people frame “knowledge” and define their professional selves in different ways. Knowledge and professional identity are closely linked. I found that the discourses on knowledge and science in agriculture are produced in the social context of professional legitimization. Dichotomies of scientific versus practical knowledge are constantly recreated and upheld because they help the different individuals and institutions to position themselves among their peers and within communities. The question is not only how experts use knowledge but also “What makes an expert an expert?”10 A scientist can place himself among the cosmopolitan, modern, and enlightened, whereas the villager is firmly located in his rural setup of tradition and ignorance. The agricultural extension agent is thus the one who, from the perspective of the villager, represents science and modernity, while in the eyes of the scientists they are to a large extent part of the rural scenery that is to be developed. In this arena of perceptions, the extension workers must constantly position themselves. Scientific and “practical” knowledge and their changing definitions are crucial to their maneuvering. “Trust” was of major importance; it determined to what extent an extensionist would be accepted by a farming community and how far his knowledge would be valued. The professional identity of an extensionist as an expert in the field, and thus his knowledge, is in this sense directly linked to trust. But how closely and in what sense are identity and knowledge linked to trust? John Harriss writes that trust is built through the experience of regularity, competence, and engagement over a long period of time (Harriss 2000). Competence, in the context of agricultural extension, is demonstrating knowledge that is applicable and useful to farmers, not the technical knowledge that extension staff can boast of in departmental sessions or NGO monthly meetings, such as Latin names of plants and pests. Public and private extension workers in Rajasthan undergo very different training cycles and patterns. It is therefore crucial not only to look at the processes of “transfer of knowledge” from extension worker to farmer but from senior staff or scientists to field-worker. In order to

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get a better understanding of this “transfer process,” specifically the simplification of scientific knowledge, I looked at the ways in which extension staff acquire knowledge. This meant taking part in their training sessions, assessing training material, and interviewing trainers and trainees. This was important in order to get an understanding of the many facets that form the extensionists’ professional identities. Many of the agents have agricultural experience that is comparable to that of the farmers they work with. Nevertheless, on the one hand they are treated as permanent (ignorant) scholars in the institutions they are employed by and on the other they have to act as experts in the field. In the departmental context, their expert status is reduced drastically in the face of the “real” experts, the scientists, agronomy officers, and directors. Here, the “expert of the field” becomes the “school boy of the department.” In this context, training can be found to create identities and recreate hierarchies. Although within their respective organizations extension workers have little influence on work procedures, schedules, and content, in the field they acquire the status of an expert, backed up by scientific legitimization and government authority. The systematization of agriculture into a science is crucial to generate the authority needed: Knowledge that is produced elsewhere is used in specifically defined local contexts by experts (researchers and extension staff) who operate as a knowledge-elite that reinterprets local realities within the framework of a global science. Cornwall and colleagues write that the entire “apparatus” . . . of agricultural research and extension—from the structure & location of agricultural colleges or institutes, to institutional & conceptual hierarchies, to the discourses of scientists or extension workers— confirms the “superiority” of western science and scientists and the “privileged solutions” they offer. Those in the higher ranks define what is worth knowing and deploy others to make this known to those who lack it. (1993: 4–5) Extension agents in rural India too are the “bearers of these ‘privileged solutions,’ and with their western expertise they are distanced mentally from the knowledges and practices of village life” (Cornwall et al. 1993: 5). However, they remain seen by development planners, donors, and government officials alike, as the ones who enjoy a direct link to rural realities and the rationale of farming communities by virtue of their background and own experience.

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The “formation” of extension workers’ identities is determined to a large extent by operational aspects such as training and externally ascribed roles. However, extension workers are also active agents in creating their identities and representation. Looking at the terminology used tells us much about how actors actively filter facts and process externally ascribed roles and norms. Extensionists make their own claims on and develop their own models of the operational reality of service provision. These, unsurprisingly, diverge significantly from the eloquent and well-formulated objectives of project guidelines and program reports. For example, during formal interviews and informal talks, the recurring image of the doctor and frequent terminological reference to the medical field struck me. Some extension workers from the public system and private organizations explicitly compare themselves to doctors or medical advisors, regarding the crops and sometimes even the farmers as their patients. But in their daily practice there is a clear difference in the relationship between extensionists and farmers and the doctor-patient relationship. The farmer is an expert himself or herself, and therefore the typical power inequality as experienced in western medicinal contexts, where the doctor is the sole authority over matters of the body and the patient merely follows the rules set by him, is not as pronounced. The application of science and the legitimization that comes with representing a government institution are, for extensionists in public services, authoritative tools that are thus comparable to the ones that medical practitioners have at their disposal. Good writes about the use of medical images when juxtaposing knowledge and belief, with knowledge representing “certitude and correctness” and belief implying “uncertainty, error, or both”: “No wonder that discussions of ‘the problem of irrational beliefs’ so often cite medical examples” (1994:21, as referred to in Pigg 1996). In agriculture the very similar juxtaposition of scientific agriculture and “traditional practice” is reflected in the image of the extension agent and the scientist as nurse and doctor, with the pesticides and new technologies comparable to the medicine prescribed by the latter. Other extensionists think of themselves as social workers: “The whole Indian economy depends on farming, so it is my good luck that I am a social worker serving the farmers” (personal communication with an agricultural supervisor, Bikaner District). But most of the field-workers in government extension describe their responsibilities with official terminology, such as the “transfer of information from research to farmer,” “to give them seeds and knowledge from scientists,” or simply to “tell

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the farmers what to do.”11 This is also reflected in the answers to questions about motivation and satisfaction of work: “I am satisfied when the farmers are working with the techniques we told them” or “I am happy when I give knowledge to the farmers.” In the private commercial sector, most of the sales executives saw themselves as middlemen and brokers of various sources of information. During my fieldwork I observed a few agents who were really interested in conveying information unrelated to product marketing, such as advice on animal husbandry or postharvest storage. But their knowledge on these issues was limited to their own experiences that had in many cases been gained in other areas of India, and therefore the content of the knowledge was of unclear value to the farmers. All of the sales representatives and supporting staff claimed that there was another aspect to their work apart from marketing a product: “We are in sales and that comprises two things: extension and marketing” (personal communication, DuPont field staff). As such, companies’ employees also see themselves as a source of information for various contacts regarding other inputs such as tractors and seed as well as for public institutions. Different forms of self-representation could be traced back to the discrepancy that extension workers felt with regard to their professional identities. Public sector agents’ self-descriptions showed that it is not always easy for them to locate themselves between the two previously mentioned extremes of being treated as school children in the departmental or organizational context on the one hand and then presenting themselves as experts in the field on the other. So the “side-switching” described by Pigg (1997: 259) is continuous. Extensionists move in and out of self- and externally ascribed roles and identities. This maneuvering is central to the field-workers’ self-identity and daily experience, both for the public and private sector agents (but maybe more pronounced for government staff members who are mostly part of a much more hierarchical system). And yet they are perceived by development planners and senior officials, and often define themselves, as “people who understand” (Pigg 1996: 177): They are able to understand the local “conditions”; they understand scientific approaches to agriculture; and they experience daily conflicts in bringing the two together. Field-workers who originate from a rural setting generally aspire to move geographically and socially. The movement will be sought away from the village setup and up the social and professional “ladder.” As Jan Knippers Black writes, “for the most part, those who invest their

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time and money in acquiring professional status do not do so to work in muddy shoes” (1991: 168). Celayne Heaton writes about NGO fieldworkers in Nepal: that none of them considered fieldwork as a career in itself. Rather, it “was seen as a phase, a stepping-stone towards better paid employment in near-urban or urban offices” (2001: 99). This, understandably, leads to a major discrepancy, which can be observed in any rural development context and in many other unrelated fields. Although the individuals in question are ideal to act as “brokers” due to their background in the respective communities, they aspire to move away from just these communities, thus making real engagement difficult for them. In the case of extension agents with a farming background, this difficulty in engagement is reflected in the reluctance of some to be called farmers themselves. At the same time they will stress their practical knowledge when required and display pride in their experience and their ability to adapt it to the field. It seems that extensionists strategically employ and stress aspects of their identities according to the arenas in which they move. Many agricultural supervisors in the public services stressed their formal education and semi-urban, modern lifestyles when communicating with their peers, superiors, or when interviewed by me. In the context of their daily work and when meeting farmers in the field, however, they would often have no hesitation to act as “proper farmers” in speech, clothing, and manner. In fact, it is often useful for them to make sure that they come across as being on par with farmers. Some extension workers, both from public and private institutions, strategically employed dress codes and changed their attire according to their daily schedules. And just as the dhoti was often worn on field visits to demonstrate equality, “town clothing” was sometimes worn in the villages, directly linked to the level of authority expected to be necessary in a particular encounter. Women who decide to become field-workers face additional problems in forming their professional identity and authority. They still present a very small percentage of field staff and are in many ways still regarded as exceptions. The logistical and operational problems of working as a government extensionist in remote areas effectively prohibit women in Rajasthan from joining the service. There is no government rule not to employ women in this field, but in practice none are recruited or even try to apply. In the private sector, NGOs or grassroots organizations have a varying percentage of women as village workers, but rarely do their activities include agricultural service provision of any kind. A comparably large NGO in Jhunjhunu District employed one

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female extension worker, a remarkable person, who faces many of the typical dilemmas of field-workers and additionally struggles with her position as a mobile and working woman in a strongly male-dominated society. Savica12 was self-confident and had tackled daily problems in her profession as a rural development worker with a straightforward approach. She clearly identified with her work and “her” NGO. Although she came from an agricultural family background, she had neither taken agricultural subjects in school nor studied agriculture at college like most of her colleagues. Instead, she had gained much of her current knowledge from her colleagues, most notably her direct superior, and through self-study. Savica saw herself as a progressive and outspoken woman and equal member within the staff community, whose responsibilities as a field-worker are the same as those of others in the NGO. She managed and monitored women’s and mixed-sex groups and advised men and women alike on issues ranging from livestock rearing and income generation to agricultural inputs, organic farming, and savings and access to credits. While she worked in the villages and in the context of the NGO, which also was dominated by men, she was outspoken and showed considerable leadership. Although she wore the customary sari, she never covered her face or head in the presence of men during her work in the villages and the NGO community. In contrast, when she went to her in-laws’ village, her sasuraal, she wore full ghunghat (veil), covering the whole head and face with the fall of her sari. Although during her daily work she supported women to develop a voice13 and even pushed them to forgo the custom of ghunghat, she herself conformed to preset family rules and societal pressure. This she perceived as a contradiction and even conflict in herself because she defined herself in categories such as “progressive,” “modern,” and “open.” But eventually she analyzed this herself as a need to switch from one part of her identity to another (me badal parti hu: I have to shift). She accepted that the way she could present herself within the framework of working as a member of staff in this particular NGO was not compatible with her identity back home or maybe even when working in a different context. As David Mosse (2005) writes, “women workers faced a double trial. They were required to work in ways, which challenged stereotypes and established new norms of gender behavior, while at the same time maintaining behavior, which would allow them to command respect within the community. They paid a high but invisible personal price in fulfilling their roles.”

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I have argued so far that knowledge and identity of agricultural extension workers are closely linked. I will now discuss the organizational context of agricultural extension and the role of knowledge in representational processes of organizations. Here the focus lies on how organizations turn internal conflicts and dissent into representations of success and consensus.

Knowledge as a resource in organizational negotiations and the turning of dissent into consensus: representing stories of success Andrew Pickering’s image of “the mangle of practice” (1993), introduced earlier in this chapter, can be usefully applied to agricultural extension organizations. The maneuvering between accommodation and resistance becomes the dialectic of scientific (or extension) practice and shifts the scientist (or the extensionist) “through the space of all the potential new . . . arrangements that he could think of” (Pickering 1993: 569). The analytical lens of resistance and accommodation applied to agricultural extension service providers reflects the tension in which organizations operate when facing, seeking, or avoiding change. The extent to which institutions are affected by pressures of societal or political and economic change varies according to structure, size, and position. The extension organizations in my study area are subject to many “resistances” of different kinds: changes in policies, climate/soil conditions, farmers’ needs and donors’ expectations, to name just a few. More specifically, in the daily work of an extensionist, there is the problem that the extension worker is not able to actually effectively “tinker” with the demonstrations when facing resistance.14 He has to explore “in real time of practice, what the contours of material agency might be” (Pickering 1993: 575). The room for maneuver of extension workers, in terms of finding “accommodations” and implementing them, is limited due to lack of contextual and in-depth background knowledge. So the organizations individually, but also as a whole, have to work around the gaps and limitations. Often it is only in the reports that the “tinkering” becomes an important aspect, and fine-tuning, that is, manipulating outcomes and target fulfillments, has to be employed.15 I realized that it was very much in the interest of field staff to be able to continue to offer such demonstrations to their contact farmers, even if they thought that they were not “successful” or “effective.” The farmers

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themselves had their own interest in maintaining a long-term relationship with the extension workers to ensure further access to various types of government subsidies or public schemes. Equally interesting, the earlier mentioned biases in contacting farmers and maintaining relationships within a community have to be understood as both resistance and accommodation. Extension workers face changing resistances from many sides and therefore find themselves in a “mangle” of their own, which they have to work within. The male, resource-rich farmer bias, for example, is on the one hand a result of the fact that much technology is only of interest to large farmers and that women are often not present at village meetings (“resistance”). On the other hand the bias can be a strategic choice made by the extension worker in order to cope with the hardships of working in the field and the need to fulfill certain targets (“accommodation”). Within organizations it is therefore more interesting to look at “what is happening that is not supposed to happen” than looking at outcomes that are within the parameters of officially accepted communication processes.16 I quickly realized that much of what was not supposed to happen, happened nevertheless because, as usual, terms, concepts, and programs meant different things to different people at different times and in different circumstances. Scientists, senior government officials, field staff, and NGO employees all have their own versions of what is considered successful agricultural development and what role extension should play. Further, these differences in versions were not only institutionally categorized but also varied immensely within organizations and among colleagues. Katy Gardner has, in this context, talked about “the contested nature of development” (1997: 134). She, too, could observe “within one project, ‘development’ meant various things to different actors and over time drew on different types of knowledge. These understandings were not discrete and separate but constantly influencing and influenced by each other” (Gardner 1997: 134). A group in which there is a substantial amount of difference in opinion and understanding of shared issues is the group of scientists from universities and the various national and state research stations. It lies in the matter of research itself that findings are contested and new developments counter evidence of formerly accepted information. But this “natural” dissent among and within the disciplines of agricultural research is immediately played down when there is an outsider audience. The diversity of opinions on any given subject within agricultural research is rarely passed on to extension staff or government officials. Recommendations are contested and not as consensual within the scientific community as

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they may seem, but knowledge of dissent never reaches the field staff. What is important is to understand how and at which point dissent is turned into consent.17 During the process and at these turning points, often highly professional language or “academic speak” is employed, so as to divert attention from what is actually being said to its form. Language becomes an instrument not only of communication but of manipulation and obstruction.

Conclusion The analysis of the process of a systematization of agricultural practice into science shows several consequences that are crucial to extension service provision. First, ignoring the power dynamics involved in the scientification of agriculture reinforces the myth that science and technology are politically neutral. Second, the disembedding of agricultural practice leads to a devaluation of local experience and farmers’ knowledge. At the same time, science and practice are dichotomized, turning scientists and extension workers into experts, while firmly placing farmers on the side of the “irrational” and of ”tradition.” Irrelevant technologies and inappropriate services for farmers can be a result of this process. In this chapter the analytical focus is drawn away from organizations’ and programs’ structures and approaches toward the internal processes, by studying the practices and daily realities their agents engage in. As I have discussed earlier, extension agents have to negotiate their professional and self-perceptions on a daily basis. Since the field-workers constantly navigate between crucial interfaces within their institutions and in villages, their understanding of themselves, of agricultural extension, and of society as a whole is crucial to institutional change. In addition, within the agricultural development arena of Rajasthan, cooperation and competition are rarely institutionalized. Instead, relationships are highly personalized and maintained through mutual trust. I argue that individual relationships and development practice shape policy in a way that makes an isolated analysis of strategic and policy changes in national and local contexts inadequate. Equally, studying organizational structures and representations cannot lead to an understanding of how the identities and aspirations of field staff influence their daily work. Indeed, it is necessary for any study of organizations to be aware of the differentiated nature of individual perspectives that are

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informed by strategic considerations on both individual and organizational levels. This means that an analysis of interorganizational relationships has to include a detailed understanding of organizational hierarchies and intraorganizational relationships.

Notes 1. The chapter is based on fieldwork for a Ph.D. research project on public and private agricultural service organizations, conducted from 2000 to 2001 in two districts of Rajasthan, India. All quotes are from interviews conducted by the author during this period. 2. The idea was taken further by philosophers and historians of science such as Thomas Kuhn (1962) and Paul Feyerabend (1975) and reformulated by the Edinburgh School, for example, in the works of Daniel Bloor (1976). 3. Farming systems research (FSR) and on-farm research (OFR) methods have developed in response to the failure of single commodityfocused research to meet the needs of complex farming systems. FSR aims at a more holistic perspective to the farming enterprise as well as trying to introduce interdisciplinarity to an often highly specialized science. In theory, FSR should also include a substantial amount of farmers’ participation, but this has not been realized regularly in practice. For more literature on FSR and participatory approaches in agricultural research and extension, see Haverkort and colleagues (1991), Norman and Collinson (1986), and Byerlee and Tripp (1988). 4. Steven Yearly includes some thoughts on development in general when he refers to the influence of political economy on science and the reverse, science’s influence on social change (1988). 5. The experimentation and demonstration plots on farmers’ fields, which extension agents officially outline according to fixed targets, are good practical examples of the influence and limitation of experimental design. 6. More recently, Pickering has applied his concept of “the mangle” to cybernetics (2002). 7. Agricultural supervisors work at the field staff level in the government extension system. They are responsible for field visits and the formation of farmers groups (Kisan Mandals) in villages within an 8-kilometer radius.

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8. Considering the fact that these dealers often also used to be moneylenders to small farmers, it is not surprising that the farmers should take an interest in their relationships to extension staff. 9. Also, the adaptation of technologies takes a long time. Vyas writes about the problem of a “time-lag” of about four to six years between the release of a variety and its wider spread adaptation reflected in commercial cultivation (1998: 90). 10. As in “what makes a child a child?” this question refers to notions of essentialism of a supposed, imposed, or taken on identity. These ideas of an essence of being a child, or in this case an expert, will help analytically but have to be abandoned in favor of more differentiated aspects of identity. 11. Quotes from different interviews with Agricultural Supervisors in Bikaner District. 12. Pseudonym. 13. It is interesting how often wearing ghunghat was also described as “not speaking.” For example “she did not speak” could simply mean “she wore ghunghat.” When extension workers often complained that women did not speak, it would often become clear that they were complaining about the women sitting in the meetings in ghunghat, which was an equivalent to being silent, even though they might answer questions. 14. Compare Karin Knorr Cetina (1981). In contrast to the extension worker, the agricultural scientist can make use of changing or adverse circumstances and “failures” of experiments to redesign them according to their goals or even to completely reformulate their research goals. 15. Officially neither farmers nor extension workers can intervene directly in an ongoing experiment. As a result much of typical creative processes are not reported and potentially useful results are lost. Participatory projects aim at these processes and try to involve farmers and field staff alike. 16. I am grateful to Caroline Osella for pointing this out with regard to my analysis. 17. This “selling” of consent also works the other way, whereby field staff generates consensus that is sold “upwards” to an organization’s planners, consultants, and donors (see David Mosse 2005).

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References Black, J.K. 1991. Development in theory and practice: Bridging the gap. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bloor, D. 1976. Knowledge and social imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Byerlee, D., and R. Tripp. 1988. Strengthening linkages in agricultural research through farming systems perspective: The role of social scientists. Experimental Agriculture 24:137–151. Callon, M. 1986. Some elements of the sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? edited by J. Law. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 196–223. Cornwall, A., I. Guijt, and A. Welbourn. 1993. Acknowledging process: Challenges for agricultural research and extension methodology. Brighton, UK: Institute for Development Studies. Evers, H.D., and P. Weingart. 1999. Entwicklungspolitische Globalisierung Teilantrag C5, SFB Antrag Signaturen der Weltgesellschaft. Unpublished application to the German Research Association (DFG), University of Bielefeld, Germany. Fairhead, J., K.S. Amanor, and M. Leach, eds. 2002. Science and the policy process: Perspectives from the forest. IDS Bulletin 33, no. 1. Brighton, UK: IDS. Feyerabend, P. 1975. Against method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Gardner, K. 1997. Mixed messages: Contested “development” and the Plantation Rehabilitation Project. In Discourses of development: Anthropological perspectives, edited by R.D. Grillo and R.L. Stirrat. Oxford: Berg, pp. 133–156. Harriss, J. 2000. Working together: The principles and practice of cooperation and partnership. In Managing development: Understanding inter-organizational relationships, edited by D. Robinson, T. Hewitt, and J. Harriss. London: Sage, pp. 225–242. Haverkort, B., J. van der Kamp, and A. Waters-Bayer. 1991. Joining farmers’ experiments: Experiences in participatory technology development. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Heaton, C. 2001. “Our differences don’t make a difference”: Practising “civil society” in Nepal's non-governmental sector. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Knorr Cetina, K. 1981. The manufacture of knowledge: An essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

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Knorr Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, T.S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. 1987. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B., and S. Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory life: Construction of a scientific fact. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mosse, D. 1997. The ideology and politics of community participation: Tank irrigation development in colonial and contemporary Tamil Nadu. In Discourses of development: Anthropological perspectives, edited by D.R. Grillo and L.R. Stirrat. Oxford: Berg, pp. 255–291. Mosse, D. 2005. Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto Press. Norman, D.W., and M. Collinson. 1986. Farming system research in theory and practice. In Agricultural Systems Research for Developing Countries, edited by J. Remenyi. ACIAR Proceedings No. 11. Canberra, Australia: ACIAR, pp. 16–30. Pickering, A. 1984. Constructing quarks: A sociological history of particle physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pickering, A. 1993. The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology 99(3):559–589. Pickering, A. 2002. Cybernetics and the mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask, http://www.soc.uiuc.edu/faculty/pickerin/cybernetics.pdf, accessed 26th January 2003. To be published in French in La reconfiguration des sciences pour l’action dans les années, edited by A. Dahan and D. Pestre, forthcoming. Paris: Presses de l’EHESS. Pigg, S.L. 1996.The credible and the credulous: The question of “villagers” beliefs’ in Nepal. Cultural Anthropology 11(2):160–201. Pigg, S.L. 1997. “Found in most traditional societies”: Traditional medical practitioners between culture and development. In International development and the social sciences: Essays on the history and politics of knowledge, edited by F. Cooper and R. Packard. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 259–290. Popper, K. 1959. The logic of scientific discovery. London: Hutchinson. Shekara, C., ed. 2001. Private extension in India. Hyderabad, India: MANAGE. Stone, D. 1997. Networks, second track diplomacy and regional cooperation: The role of Southeast Asian think tanks. Paper presented at the 38th annual International Studies Association Convention, March, Toronto.

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Traweek, S. 1988: Beamtimes and lifetimes: The world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vitebsky, P. 1993. Is death the same everywhere? Contexts of knowing and doubting. In An anthropological critique of development: The growth of ignorance, edited by M. Hobart. London: Routledge, pp. 100–115. Vyas, K.L. 1998. Release and popularization of cultivars in Rajasthan. In Seeds of choice: Making the most of new varieties for small farmers, edited by J.R. Witcombe, D. Virk, and J. Farrington. London: IT Publications, pp. 85–103.

NINE “THEY CAN’T MIX LIKE WE CAN”

Bracketing Differences and the Professionalization of NGOs in Nepal

Celayne Heaton Shrestha NGOs were relatively new players on the development scene in Nepal when this research was carried out in October 1996 to December 1997. Indeed, until the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) of 1990 overthrew the partyless Panchayat regime (1960–1990), the absence of many fundamental rights had all but stifled nongovernmental activity. The impact of the changed political climate on the nongovernmental sector was immediate and dramatic: From a mere 250 in 1989, the number of organizations registered with the Social Welfare Council in Kathmandu shot to 1,210 in 1993 and to 5,978 by 1997. Besides the challenges of developing new relationships and modes of working with governmental organizations and donors, a key concern for NGOs was to establish their credibility among Nepal’s public, to develop a new identity and approach that would distance them from past development failures. Above all, NGOs needed to distance themselves from the widespread criticism of the state, namely that it was rife with “corruption” and largely self-serving. For the intelligentsia, as well as many frontline NGO workers, NGOs offered an opportunity to break with “corrupt,” personalistic modes of appointment and promotion and access to services. For elite or “power NGOs,”1 this break was to be achieved through an increased professionalism in development work and a renewed commitment to working with groups usually bypassed by governmental projects—“the poorest of the poor,” women, low-caste groups, or persons not belonging to the close-knit aphno manche networks2 or engaged in relations of patronage with senior members of the organization. 195

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Beyond the participatory, democratic character of organizational culture for which NGOs had been celebrated (e.g., Clark 1991), NGO workers in Nepal were seeking to distinguish themselves from organizations past and present through the intention to “serve others,” that is, persons who lay outside the network of kin, ethnic group, or locality of members of the implementing agency. This claim represented a radical departure from past practice: Prior to 1990, the vast majority of non-state organizations had been “membership” organizations, established and run for the sole benefit of their members, while public service had been monopolized by the state. Any non-state organization’s attempts to take on such public functions were met with repression (Burghart 1994). NGOs were now claiming that not only were the ability to work with such groups and an increasing professionalism not contradictory, they actually reinforce each other. Educated, well-remunerated staff would easily “adapt to anything” and learn from anything; for NGO workers, the social and cultural differences between the developers and targets of NGO interventions did not “make a difference.” Close scrutiny of day-to-day field practices, however, brought to light the extent to which the public transcript of NGOs’ disregard for difference was the product of ongoing work by frontline workers aimed at the production of such difference. Indeed, the neat distinction found in NGO discourse—between beneficiaries and benefactors; developees and developers; the educated, urbane, professional developers and the rural, “conservative” beneficiaries—belied the extent to which certain benefactors resembled the targets of development. This chapter starts with an anecdote, “Gender Awareness in Besgaun,”3 to introduce the setting for the observations that follow, and to illustrate the kinds of identity work that were a regular feature of project activities. In a manner similar to that noted by Rossi in Niger (Chapter 2, this volume), benefactors attempt to produce “appropriate beneficiaries”: to “extract” from the assembled beneficiaries an acknowledgment of their seemingly problematic, “unprogressive” gender practices. Also evident is the benefactors’ difficulty in accommodating beneficiaries’ insistence that “men too carry out women’s work,” recalling Luetchford’s account of Coocafé and the unacceptability of its distortion of the image of marginality and poverty on which fair trade was based (Chapter 6, this volume). And through Ratna’s account of how he acquired a scar on his finger, the anecdote anticipates the argument developed in the paper, namely that development interventions are not only the site of formation of beneficiary identities, but also an arena for the ongoing, and contested,

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crafting of benefactor identities—both as credible “benefactors” and as members of Nepal’s growing middle class.

Gender awareness in Besgaun The occasion was a gender awareness training (GAT) session in a village called Besgaun, in a fairly remote hill district in Nepal. Besgaun was one of the nearer field sites in this NGO’s project area, a mere onehour walk from the bazaar where the office was located. Ratna, Prakash, Keshav—three NGO field-workers—and I left the sub-office early that day, soon after our “morning meal,” to buy biscuits for the participants in the training they were scheduled to be running in Besgaun. We descended easily and swiftly, with the gait of habituated field-workers, unperturbed by the uneven ground or the fine, powdery dust thrown up with every step. Besgaun was the first cluster, and the Savings and Credit Organisation (SCO) chairman’s house the first port of call. We entered a large courtyard and were obviously recognized, as men brought out chairs for us amid rounds of namaste. As it was lunchtime, however, they all soon disappeared into a separate hut, and Ratna, Prakash, Keshav, and I were left alone in the courtyard. Ratna and Prakash went off to look at some project vegetable fields, and Keshav and I went to wander though Besgaun. By the time Keshav and I got back to the chairman’s house, the courtyard had been repeopled: Several men were seated, smoking a hookah, and Ratna and Prakash were poring over the SCO’s record books. Keshav began writing on a sheet of brown paper: “GAT talim” (training). Meanwhile, women from other houses poured into the courtyard and seated themselves on a mat that had been brought out of the house. Keshav pulled out another large brown sheet and began crafting what I recognized as a “women’s chart” for the first GAT exercise. With Ratna’s prompting, the women were encouraged to itemize the various tasks they might engage in during the course of a day and to estimate a period of time for each task. The men’s group did the same, guided by Prakash. The number of hours of work were then totaled and recorded on the sheets by Ratna and Prakash, in their respective groups. It began to rain. Ratna grabbed the paper charts; two women folded up the mat; other women and men scattered for shelter, some inside the separate kitchen, others pressing themselves against the walls of the house, still others squeezing into the house’s ground-floor rooms. Eventually we settled into a low-ceilinged room on the house’s first floor. In the dim

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light, men sat with men, women with women. I helped Ratna and Keshav tape the charts to the wall of the room before joining the women in the far corner. Standing up, Ratna requested that we stop chatting and look at the charts. “See,” he pointed out, “men work 12.5 hours in a day and women 18.5.” As in other GATs, Ratna told how male NGO staff cooked and cleaned pots and pans and washed clothes themselves in the office, and (using a technique learned from another field-worker’s GAT technique) added, “when I’m at home, I cut fodder too!” Here said field-worker would have pointed to an old scar on his finger, one he had acquired while stripping wood as a child. For lack of a scar, Ratna did not offer evidence of his fodder cutting. Out of semi-obscurity in the men’s corner came a bemused voice: “No, you don’t cut fodder, you’re a karmacarya!”4 Ratna, stopped dead in his tracks, smiled. A few seconds went by, with Ratna standing, marker in hand, head tilted, and some of the men chuckling, stirring, and reseating themselves. Ratna, still smiling, corrected himself: “I’m talking about men generally in my area! Now then,” he continued, “is it possible to redress this imbalance in work hours?” From that point the GAT followed the format to which I had become habituated: field-workers and beneficiaries coming to some agreement about which “women’s tasks” men could take on and which tasks women would let men take on. “The women don’t want to give grinding grain and milking cows to the men; but the men can cook, bring water, and cut fodder” Ratna summarized. Then from the men’s corner a protest came: “We do this already, if there is no wife or women in the house or if they are sick!” But Ratna had his back turned and was writing on a third sheet of paper he had just taped next to the other two charts, the protest seemingly unheeded. Turning around to face the seated crowd, he displayed the list of duties the men had said they would take on, and concluded the GAT. “We’ll come, every now and again, and ask you if you are doing these things.” The men followed the field-worker out of the door. The rain had stopped. The women and I were ousted by the SCO chairman, and we had begun settling on the mat in the courtyard when the SCO chairman came out of the kitchen with a platter carrying steaming cups of milk tea. “Look, we do women’s work here!” he said as he offered me a steel cup.

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We did not stay long thereafter. Beneficiary hospitality generally signaled that the meeting was coming to a close, and soon we set off on the long climb back to the field office.

NGOs in the study: focus and organization The core of the study consisted of intense fieldwork in the headquarters and selected field sites of two Nepali nongovernmental organizations, which will be referred to by the pseudonyms CART and BEACON. Both CART and BEACON were multi-sited, one with its headquarters in a regional capital and the other with its head office in Kathmandu. Both were well known in NGO and INGO circles in Nepal, both were funded by foreign donors, and in both cases, day-today activities were run by a contingent of well-paid, full-time workers supported by paid volunteers. The areas covered by each project office were vast. In a single project area, for example, 20 members of CART staff serviced a population of 30,000 across 155 villages. BEACON estimated its total beneficiaries at 100,000 in six districts, with a staff of ninety-seven. The scale of these operations meant that although field-workers would be “in the field” almost every day, contact with individual beneficiary sites could be rather infrequent. In keeping with development priorities at the time, both of the NGOs in the study stressed the development and strengthening of “civil society” in the form of community-based organizations (CBOs; see, e.g., Van Rooy 1998) and a “participatory approach” to their work. The kinds of activities offered by the project and, more particularly, the way they were run by field-workers, however, bore traces of the histories of the organizations and individual field-workers involved, as well as the “participatory development” and “good governance” agendas recently espoused by NGOs. BEACON’s strength lay in informal education and CART’s in agricultural research and extension; many field-workers in the two organizations had formerly worked as teachers in local primary and secondary schools. Consistently, the objectives of empowerment and governance were met—in CART through agriculture-based income generation programs, and in BEACON through educational programs of various kinds. Consistently, too, staff saw their contribution to local development as lying in their role as educators, in improving people’s “habits and behavior” (Nepali bani byabahar) more than in the material benefits or

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“comforts” they brought to project areas. In contrast with the situation described by Desai (Chapter 8, this volume), the definition of fieldworkers’ professional identities did not revolve around their technical skills and knowledge, even though a number were trained agricultural extensionists and overseers. Rather, through precept and example, staff saw their role as “bringing light.” Bikas or “development” was imparted through non-formal education (NFE) classes—in which students were taught basic literacy and numeracy skills, as well as “good habits” such as thrift and cleanliness—and also through staff behavior. Field-workers were often reminded by their managers that they were to be “models of behavior”—indeed, that they embody bikas. Field staff whose communal kitchen was in view of passersby in the local bazaar paid particular attention to its cleanliness; all staff were impeccable in their dress, often changing into smarter clothing for field visits. There was to be “no betting, women, or alcohol.” The purported boozing or philandering of one or another member of the staff was a staple of office politics and a favorite topic of hushed conversations; and on the one occasion that staff were overheard singing and laughing in one of the communal kitchens, they were quietly reprimanded the following day by the project area coordinator. The drive toward professionalization of development work among elite NGOs meant an increasing reliance on a salaried and highly qualified workforce. Through the employment of graduates, management sought to ensure that the NGO’s newsletters, brochures, rules and regulations, and project proposals would be crafted to adhere to a high standard of English. Competence in English meant that NGO members could partake more fully of life in development circles, where English was still the lingua franca. Although some INGOs had begun accepting proposals in Nepali and were developing “partnership manuals” for their NGO counterparts in Nepali, conferences and INGO-NGO “partnership” events and training were generally still held in English; and the literature that staff were encouraged to consult during “downtime” at the office was also in English. English-speaking staff meant that representatives of the donor organization, foreign volunteers (at least in the early stages of their stay), could more easily be accommodated during field visits, placements in the NGO, or the occasional “social call” to the NGO’s main office. Professionalizing development practice also meant a strong field orientation. The NGOs’ field orientation helped these organizations live up to their international reputation of being able to reach the more marginal target groups. This increased commitment of NGOs to the remote

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and the grassroots meant, first, a more intense interaction with beneficiaries: Staff spent considerably more time in individual sites, had more contact with beneficiaries compared with government workers, and had greater contact with populations frequently bypassed by government projects, namely the low-caste and non-caste groups. Second, this field orientation meant an emphasis in training on fieldwork skills (PRA training, gender-in-development training). Finally, field staff work schedules were designed around the beneficiaries, and the NGO core staff’s work around field-based events (for example, field visits were subject to detailed planning sometimes months in advance; see Heaton 2002). These “reversals” (Chambers 1997) opened up a rich terrain for the exploration and even exploitation of identity and difference in project relationships.

Managing difference: “anti-developmental” identities As well as reintroducing basic civil liberties, the MRD of 1990 ushered in a period of unprecedented debate around issues of caste, ethnicity, religion, language, and national identity. This period also witnessed growing social activism, with both the janajati or “indigenous people’s” movement and the women’s movement gathering force.5 In keeping with their middle-class roots, the types of organizations labeled NGO, however, were more likely to emphasize universalistic orientations and values, rather than the particularism celebrated by such movements. As Adams (1998) noted, the involvement of the professional middle classes in the movement of 1990 had been prompted by a desire to rid public practice of hierarchy, partiality, and modes of public practice that tied authority to innate or inherited privilege. Caste, or jat,6 was singled out as the mark of such unacceptable practice. Echoing colonial discourse and modernization theories that had dominated development practice and thinking during the Panchayat years,7 jat was denounced as “anti-developmental” (Tuladhar 1994). This view is expressed most articulately in Bista’s controversial Fatalism and Development (1991), which locates the roots of Nepal’s underdevelopment in a “culture of dependency” epitomized by the institution of aphno manche. At the individual level, the ability to disregard considerations of caste and the temptation to draw on aphno manche to achieve personal goals were considered the mark of the progressive individual. The “undeveloped” world and the nonprogressive individual, on the other

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hand, were seen as mired in irrational traditionalism and fettered by the strictures of ascriptive identities.8 In development circles, a progressive attitude toward “gender” was also de rigueur, a result of both the increasing number of “women’s NGOs” and the mainstreaming of “gender” in development practice. The existence of such abilities, which were seen as lacking among the targets of development, however, were not always assumed to be present in NGOs either. As a result, the identities of benefactors and beneficiaries became matters of intense concern. But NGOs were far from socially homogeneous. While all NGO staff were highly qualified, as one moved from the central office to the field office educational levels decreased. This was more apparent among BEACON project staff, where not only were the graduates found in the central office alone, but a position with a given title (for example, field coordinator) was occupied by a person with a lesser qualification when the position happened to lie in a more remote area. Field office (FO) staff had also studied in less prestigious institutions. Field and core staff also differed in their occupational history: Among the former some had been field-workers on government or nongovernmental projects in their home areas, but the majority had worked as teachers in local schools, and all had practiced agriculture; core staff members had been employed as consultants in the case of senior staff, or field-workers in the case of more junior staff on governmental or nongovernmental organizations, international as well as national, and none had practiced agriculture. Staff in field and central offices displayed significant disparities along gender lines: Women were most likely to find employment where the job was marked as “women’s work,” which consisted mostly of “field positions.” And again, in relation to jat identity, field staff tended to be drawn from a wider range of caste or ethnic groups than core staff. FO staff were in many respects very similar to the beneficiaries of NGO projects. Beneficiary groups in both project areas included bankers, local government officials, and teachers—that is, people in occupations that field-workers had themselves practiced “at home”—and living conditions in the FO bore much resemblance to staff’s life “back home.” Beneficiaries themselves commented on these similarities; more specifically, they objected to the suggestion that benefactors and beneficiaries were as different as the benefactors contended, with respect not only to gender practices but, more generally, to their aspirations. Mention was often made by beneficiaries of one or another commercial farmer or rotating credit organization whose success had predated the arrival of the NGO and its projects to develop “rational” orientations among “backward” populations.

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The contrast with central office (CO) staff’s lifestyle and values was stark. One “core” employee confided that she had been taken aback by the reality of the field—“It was not romantic at all, not like trekking”— and a junior member of FO staff commented, “They [‘core’ staff] are educated people; they can’t mix like we can.” The sensitivity of management to differences within the NGO was particularly acute in relation to caste. The concern with caste, which operated as a marker of difference between beneficiary and benefactor, was also drawn upon to make distinctions between persons within a single organization. Before I left for one of the NGO’s project areas, for instance, I was asked by managers not to raise the topic “in the field”: “Staff . . . may feel that because management are all Brahmin they have some bias against them. . . . This may cause problems with field staffmanagement relations.” This was exacerbated by the managers’ insecurity toward both their field staff and their own ability to oversee the more far-flung projects. Management—as well as staff—generally acknowledged that shared tastes and experience (which could be based on considerations of caste and regional origin) often led individuals to socialize with one rather than the other group; this much was taken to be “natural.” However, unchecked, such “natural” proclivities could not only bring into question NGO claims to impartiality and inclusiveness; it could also threaten the already tenuous loyalty of field office staff. Management sought to secure the loyalty of its field office staff primarily by ensuring that they were in regular contact with them— through weekly phone calls, where there was a phone; through central office staff visits; and by inviting field staff to the central office for training, anniversary festivities, and the annual general meeting. Management also sought to prevent staff from developing what they termed “cross-cutting” and “contradictory” commitments, and to secure staff loyalty to the management of the NGO through their choice of postings. Senior project staff, coordinators, and technical staff were never appointed to projects operating in their home districts. Nor was field staff generally recruited from the district in which the project was implemented, with the exception of paid volunteers (women community health volunteers or NFE facilitators) or junior staff, such as NFE supervisors and “messengers.” Junior project staff were recruited by the project coordinator after consultation with local dignitaries or, in the case of membership organizations, with local committee members. Occasionally, junior staff were recruited among beneficiaries when the project had been running for some time. Moreover, in cases where “local

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staff” were recruited by the project, these persons generally did not work within “commuting distance” of their home village. This meant that even “local staff” had to take rented accommodations (dera), returning home on weekends. In other words, management followed a deliberate policy to intensify beneficiary-benefactor difference. The implications for fieldwork and field-workers are the subject of the following section.

Distance and differentiation in the field Isolation When staff described their lives as field-workers, they spoke of a sense of nonbelonging, in a social, physical, and even spiritual sense. The field, a place away from “home,” where one had to live in a dera or other people’s house, eat hotel meals or other people’s food, was a place of loneliness and temporariness, a place where neither the water nor the climate “suited,” and the gods had disconcerting ways—a pardesh of sorts.9 Uncertainty, mistrust, and discomfort were the dominant moods of day-to-day life in project areas. Relationships were temporary, inconsequential, and far removed from the meaningful world of “home.” Most staff members reluctantly left their spouses behind and would request them to visit only occasionally and for short periods. Lack of facilities, good schools, and the standards of health care to which staff had become accustomed deterred them from bringing their children to the field. Not all could afford the time and financial outlay that a trip to a Tarai or Kathmandu hospital would necessitate, should an emergency occur. Staff could not count on a steady supply of foods they considered essential, such as green vegetables or milk, let alone running water and a consistent flow of electricity. In project areas, staff dera, and field offices, the field-workers’ dependence on shops and bazaars patronized by bus and truck drivers and their passengers kept them removed from local life. To go to the field meant leaving the ridge and the road, with its offices, shops, and motorized traffic, and walking down narrow, dusty tracks in the dry season and paths that became slippery with the monsoon rains and were treacherous by torchlight. Field sites, moreover, were often at a distance from the bustle of beneficiary life. The venue of the GAT in Besgaun, the SCO chairman’s house, was unusual. Frequently, the field site would be a government-owned pasture, a schoolyard outside a village or in BEACON, or a forest clearing between villages.

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Staff were also somewhat isolated socially. Majja, or “fun,” and comfort were sought in the company of other staff or in other (NGO or INGO) offices in the vicinity, as well as from outsiders to the area. Not infrequently, in staff quarters or the back of a tea shop after a site visit, staff (of the same sex) would hold each other’s hand, sit with one arm around another’s shoulder, or stroke another’s hair. Staff would visit each other’s deras, go to tea shops together, and buy food and snacks for each other. Within this group romantic liaisons were not unheard of, and business relations were frequently initiated. In CART some staff members had set up a rotating credit fund, and others were speaking of forming their own NGO together. Staff and beneficiaries, on the other hand, would not mix “informally”; they would not visit tea shops together or spend their free time in each other’s company. When food was provided to beneficiaries after training or a workshop, it would be paid for by “the project” and not by individual members of the staff. Beneficiaries were usually met in field sites in the context of projectrelated activities, commonly group meetings arranged in advance and during which staff would check SCO accounts or NFE attendance records, or answer beneficiary queries regarding the project. Interaction was typically brief; both beneficiaries and staff had other work to attend to. Staff never went to field sites without a “work-related purpose.” There the staff’s behavior (greeting even unknown persons on the way to the site) and language (speaking the local dialect rather than Nepali or English) were considered “part of the job.” This feeling of nonbelonging was in part deplored, and in part cultivated by staff and encouraged by management. Verbal proscriptions on the part of management and staffing policy were aimed at minimizing nonofficial contact with local populations. On the whole, management was successful; the field, however, was never quite the “non-place” (Augé 1995) management intended it to be for staff. At times, staff could be heard speaking fondly of one or another village: the food there was good and the tea was milky; another confided that going to the village was a welcome respite from the office bickering; a third, whose home area happened to be nearby, would spend an extra night in the field while other staff returned to the field office; and particular sites came to “belong” to one field-worker or another—to become, temporarily, part of who they were. A given field site, placed under the jurisdiction of an individual staff member by the organization, would remain the domain of that field-worker alone. Other members would not venture to the site in the worker’s absence, and in his or her presence would adopt a rather subordinate role, a kind

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of assistant to the field-worker whose site it was. There were two cases of close relations being established between staff and beneficiaries in the form of mit (fictive kin; Okada 1957) relationships; unfortunately, I could not investigate these, as I learned of their existence toward the end of my stay with the NGO in question. Finally, the frequent joking— even teasing—among staff about “having become low caste” after visits to low-caste project areas suggests that the possibility (or threat) of becoming like beneficiaries may have been entertained by field-workers themselves. Not only were beneficiaries and benefactors not locked into incommensurable lifeworlds as Rossi (Chapter 2, this volume) argues; but through their fieldwork, cohabiting, and sharing similar life conditions came a kind of rapprochement, a convergence of worlds.

Trust and field-worker morality Although most projects ran rapport-building activities only for the first six months to a year, with central staff assuming that access and participation had been secured by that time, “rapport building” for staff did not cease in year 1. Negotiations over the terms of beneficiary participation, as well as field-worker participation (i.e., their contribution to the project, in terms of labor or money) were ongoing and required much ingenuity and resourcefulness on the part of staff. During one protracted negotiation session with project beneficiaries, the project leader told the assembled beneficiaries a story: One bideshi [foreigner] is about to visit Nepal; he asks a friend what the country is like. He’s told it’s very beautiful. “What are the people like?” he presses his friend. “Friendly,” replies the friend. Finally he asks, “What’s the marketing like?” The friend tells him that whatever price he is quoted, he must halve that. So the bideshi reaches Nepal, and it begins to rain. There is a traveling salesman with umbrellas, and the bideshi asks, “How much?” “300NR,” replies the salesman. The bideshi, remembering the advice on bartering, says, “150.” The salesman thinks, “Well, it’s my first customer, so I can give him a good price and catch up later in the day with other customers,” so he agrees. The bideshi then thinks, “Oh, maybe I should ask for half again,” and he does, again and again, until the salesman, exasperated, exclaims, “Just take

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the umbrella for free!” But the bideshi, remembering his friend’s words, insists: “Give me a second one free!”10 That day we left the assembled beneficiaries in a thoughtful mood; perhaps the fact that I never heard about this “problematic group” again is testament to the coordinator’s rhetorical skills. But field-workers have not always been so successful in recruiting beneficiaries on NGO terms. In the past beneficiaries were attracted by some of the advantages of getting involved with a project, but the level of participation expected by project management was at times higher than the level beneficiaries were prepared to give. Staff were intensely aware that their jobs depended on this participation, and the terms of beneficiary participation were a constant preoccupation for field workers. What might be the cost, and how long would negotiations take? Benefactors were operating on a strict timeline and could ill afford beneficiary procrastination. Field-workers were aware that “building good relations” with beneficiaries as well as local dignitaries was crucial in their line of work; their ability to convince, “talk sweetly,” and be trusted by beneficiary populations, they would point out, could make or break an entire project, and with it the reputation of the NGO as well as their jobs. Key to this ability to “talk sweetly” and “build good relations” with beneficiaries were the actions of staff, whose authority in the project area depended as much on their “correct” behavior as on their knowledge or competence, as Desai (Chapter 8, this volume) shows, or even their wealth and access to other valued resources—contacts in Kathmandu, the project’s 4×4 vehicle, or a photocopying machine. On several occasions, I witnessed beneficiaries gaining the upper hand during some delicate negotiations, undermining the arguments carefully built up by a field-worker to entice beneficiaries to participate, by turning the discussion into one about the moral standing of the individuals involved. Field-workers, indeed, were subject not just to managerial appraisal but also to that of project beneficiaries. Not only was their technical competence—as agriculturalists, as teachers—under scrutiny; staff were evaluated in terms of their religious observances, their attitudes toward women, and the behavior and ijjat (honor or respectability) of female staff; their eating and drinking habits, social customs, and whether they smoked or gambled. Their entire way of life, in other words, was susceptible to scrutiny and evaluation in terms of (highcaste) moral frameworks. Concessions were made in acknowledgment that field-workers’ transient status made practicing “their customs”

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more difficult; but the assumption of shared cultural frameworks meant that beneficiaries were less forgiving of a field-worker’s transgressions than they might have been of a foreign aid worker’s, whose “faux-pas” might have been excused even if found distasteful. The sense among staff of being under “local surveillance” was acute, although during the entire period of research, I rarely came across any actual “surveilling.” One such instance did occur during my stay in CART, though, when it was brought to the field office coordinator’s attention that some sensitive piece of information had been leaked to local dignitaries. In the aftermath of this incident—and of the coordinator’s warning that if staff were to discuss such issues, they should do so more discreetly—staff refrained from discussing the project and individuals from the local area near windows in the office or their own rooms. During the period leading up to the local elections of 1997, staff became even more aware of their conspicuousness: No matter where they happened to be, staff would refuse to talk about politics and would hush any member who attempted to broach the topic, lest their words be overheard by some local person, who might thus come to think that the organization supported a particular party.11

Bracketing differences We find in the field-worker’s predicament—the need to be sufficiently acceptable or similar to beneficiaries yet appropriately distant and “progressive”—a concern over becoming an “insider” but without “going native,” which is common to missionary and anthropological endeavors. However, unlike the missionary or the researcher, NGO workers did not deliberately seek to “blur boundaries” between themselves and the people among whom they worked: They did not adopt local dress, eating habits, dwelling form, or local titles; they did not, as was the case for early-nineteenth-century missionaries (e.g., Ross 1984), marry “local” women.12 NGO workers did not seek to develop intimate relationships with key individuals over extended periods of time. Benefactors were unlikely to ever return to project areas once the project was over. Rather, field-workers sought to transcend the difference that they, and management, through the particular spatial and social organization of the NGO, had worked to create through a series of strategies aimed at “bracketing” differences. They claimed, in other words, that differences “did not make a difference.”

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NGO workers were particularly attentive to the expression of an “inappropriate” concern with caste or aphno manche relations or insufficiently inclusive behavior toward women. Actors would commonly “read” or evaluate another’s views and attitudes toward jat from their commensal habits: Might they share water or cooked foods with others known to be of lower jat status? Would they accept only fruit or items bought from a shop (for example, biscuits)? They would also evaluate others’ socializing: To what lengths might they go to avoid mixing with persons of lower jat? And in speech, how salient was jat as an aspect of their interpretations and retellings of situations and relationships? In relation to aphno manche, staff would watch and listen for the following clues: Did any individual member of staff overtly pander to persons known to be well connected—being excessively attentive, fetching them at the bus stop upon their return from a trip outside the project area, or offering to carry their luggage? If related to a person of influence within the organization, did they interact with that person a little too frequently? Finally, in relation to gender, were staff willing or reluctant to do “women’s tasks”? Did they sit and speak with their wives and take an interest in their activities? Would they eat together with or before women? Staff sought to “bracket” jat in a number of ways. In the more public settings, jat was not mentioned by name. One was not to refer to the jat nature of actions or motivations; jat would appear in speech as joking or innuendo, through euphemism and past-tense narratives. Actions that could reveal one’s stance toward jat (eating and sharing rice, religious ceremonies, marriage) were avoided between persons involved with the NGO in an official capacity, be they staff, beneficiaries, or general assembly members. Where staff could not avoid cooking and sharing foods, they might accept tea from low-caste beneficiaries, for example, while noting that “[where I come from], low caste, high caste doesn’t matter; we even share rice—here they throw water at you!”13 Similarly, certain expressions of “gender” were banished from the more public dimensions of NGO life, such as the organization of space or organizational terminology. NGO staff would point to the lack of segregation of men and women to support their claim that, for them, gender differences “didn’t make a difference”; like Ratna in Besgaun, they would insist that they themselves performed “women’s tasks.” They challenged dominant gender models in actively pursuing women beneficiaries—for instance, when trying to arrange project users’ group meetings—emphasizing that gender difference did not constitute a barrier to the mixing of men and women.14

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The subject of aphno manche was broached only through the use of euphemism, with manifestations of relatedness or aphno manche connections among staff masked. Staff who might address each other as timi (close, “you”) in private would switch to the formal tapai in front of other office workers; or the relation would be disguised by changing surnames, using the clan (thar) instead of the caste name (jat), for instance. Persons who were related in some way ensured that they did not spend more time with each other than with other members of staff— all the more so when one of the parties was in a senior position in the NGO. NGO workers did not deny that jat, gender, or aphno manche considerations were meaningful in some way. NGO staff acknowledged the moral claims of jat when, for instance, accepting tea from low castes while advertising their own caste status; or the moral claims of dominant patriarchal gender models when male field-workers “pursued women,” going to individual houses and encouraging women to come to some project event, yet maintaining a degree of physical distance between themselves and beneficiary women once the event was under way. The same was true when they asserted their roles as “guardians” of female ijjat, arranging for private transportation to spare female staff the discomfort of public transport and the risk of contact with male passengers during trips to and from the field, better living arrangements in the field, or perhaps shorter working hours so that women would not have to walk the project area late in the evening. But the claim was that this was done in respect of the significance that “others” attached to caste, aphno manche connections, and gender. Their own attitudes towards jat, gender, and other social distinctions remained difficult to ascertain. Beneficiaries did not always find field-worker claims and their attempts to bracket differences or to “neuter” themselves entirely credible, as was illustrated in the opening anecdote. But if on occasion beneficiaries gently mocked the field-worker concerned, “disregarding” considerations of jat or gender could lead to more profound setbacks in relations with beneficiaries. Several field-workers in CART actively tried to subvert caste rules of commensality when they arrived in the field, forcibly obtaining food from low castes or entering high-caste kitchens by some ruse. Staff soon found that this made their work impossible, as they would not get the “respect” necessary from beneficiaries in order for the project to run smoothly. The same applied to gender, as Dipak found out when he “forgot” gender on one (embarrassing) occasion. Dipak and I had just finished a monthly meeting with beneficiaries in Chandkhola and were speaking

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with men beneficiaries about an upcoming GAT, which, we said, “women should be encouraged to attend in great numbers.” One of the two men, shrugging his shoulders, told us in a rather nonchalant manner, “Well, they may not be able to attend . . . they’re so busy these days with the harvest” “You’re lying!” Dipak, agitated, exclaimed. “They don’t come because you don’t let them . . .” His words trailed off. The two men stiffened; one stared defiantly at Dipak. In the brief, weighty silence that ensued, a look of hesitancy passed over Dipak’s face. He did not insist. In these circumstances, appropriate behavior on the part of a male outsider was to accept the “lie.” As things stood, his interactants’ response suggested that his motives—like the interest of NGO workers in beneficiaries’ wives and daughters generally—were suspected of being less than honorable. Field-workers’ attempts to enroll beneficiaries in their projects were undermined by their own efforts to construct themselves as progressive through the “bracketing” of differences, as this put their morality, and thus their credibility and authority, in question. This in turn furnished beneficiaries with an opportunity to strengthen their position in their negotiations with staff; for instance, the “bracketing” of gender served as a justification for beneficiary women in abstaining from “participation.” To his chagrin, Dipak was not successful in increasing the number of women beneficiaries in subsequent project activities. On the whole, the “bracketing of differences,” part of the savoir faire of development workers (Bierschenk et al. 2000), was effective in allowing field-workers to confirm the official representations of the distinctiveness of benefactors and beneficiaries while allowing them to gloss over the implications of such differences. But this work of identity had a relevance that extended beyond the everyday practicalities of development, in social arenas far removed from the immediate project and relations with its beneficiaries. The objectification of beneficiaries as “people for whom difference matters” was perhaps less successful as a strategy to sensitize (see Rossi, Chapter 2, this volume) beneficiaries into behaving in conformance with development discourse than in helping to legitimize, in field-workers’ minds, their intervention, giving meaning to their work and to the many contradictions generated by its piecemeal nature, and rapidly changing development priorities and fashions, as Mosse (2004) points out. The view of beneficiaries as “tradition bound” served as a constant, reinforcing the conviction of field-workers that their contribution to development lay principally in their capacity as teachers imparting the precepts of recent development thinking, such as “participation” and “gender balance.”

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Moreover, as they entered the NGO sector, staff gained access to many of the trappings and values of middle-class Nepal. Staff often stated that the financial benefits they gained from the NGO were negligible, insufficient to affect their material lives in a significant way. Their choices of schooling, clothing, and other options, however, did change, as did the facilities to which they had access. In BEACON, karyakarta would point to changes in the clothes and lifestyle of CO staff: their wives’ discarding the traditional dress in favor of the sari (a garment associated with higher castes and sophisticated urban dwellers) and their children’s recent enrollment in private, English-medium schools. These choices and the use of (modern, high-status) office facilities allowed staff to enhance their standing locally through the performance of seemingly mundane tasks such as writing letters or traveling short distances. Staff also gained access to a space in which to experiment with new modes of being and identifying. “At home,” many field-workers stressed, subjects such as the redistribution of household resources along gender lines were off-limits—“baba would kill me,” one female field-worker confessed—as was eating with low castes; “one son was refused entry into his parents’ house after they’d heard of his behavior,” a Nepali INGO worker explained. Pigg (1992) argues that aligning oneself with “development” and familiarity with the language of development qualifies individuals to work within the institutions of development. Here, developing proper dispositions had implications for future employability also; in one NGO, at least, management began to recruit and train staff in consideration of their sympathies toward “the poor” or “backward people.” Such development settings, then, by allowing field-workers to constitute themselves as modern, was providing certain categories of benefactors a unique opportunity to redraw not just project beneficiaries’ but their own social trajectories.

Final remarks To conclude, I would like to highlight two main points that emerge from the ethnography presented in this chapter. First, I sought to show how development projects can become the site for the formation of identity—in the case presented here, the formation of the identities of NGO workers as progressive and middle-class,and also, although this was only briefly touched on, the identity of NGOs as impartial and professional organizations.

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I showed how these various identities hinged on the constitution of “beneficiaries” as Other, as mired in irrational practices and ascriptive identities, which NGOs and their workers had managed to transcend. They hinged, above all, on the distinctiveness of benefactors and beneficiaries. I then drew attention to the disjunctures between these representations and the day-to-day realities. I described how management and staff themselves worked to intensify the distance between benefactors and beneficiaries, and I wrote of the dilemma facing field-workers, under pressure to act morally and unable to wholly reject the moral claims of caste, aphno manche, and (dominant) gender models, while also being called upon to uphold the official representations of the distinctiveness of benefactors and beneficiaries. Staff partly resolved this dilemma by “bracketing” differences; they were acknowledged as real but inconsequential—for them, at least. I also showed how the ideal of a clear-cut distinction between these categories of actors was not always neatly drawn from the start, and was further threatened by staff’s and beneficiaries’ similar living conditions. The second point I sought to make concerns the role of brokers in development. Clearly, field-workers did not so much seek to translate incommensurable worlds as prevent these worlds from “mixing.” In other words, they did not seek to bridge or broker these disjunctures, as suggested by notions of “bridging” (Arce and Long 1993) or “translation” (following Callon 1986); rather, NGO workers sought to maintain and reproduce these disjunctures. This leads me to suggest that an important task of development brokers—and more particularly, frontline workers—is not just the translation of separate worlds, but also, to borrow from Latour (1997), the work of “purification”: keeping distinct the world of beneficiaries, the “particularistic,” “tradition bound,” “non-modern,” and the world of benefactors, “the progressive,” “universalistic,” ”modern.” I hope that this chapter has at least served as a reminder that the world of development cannot easily be captured in dichotomous terms, and that continuing to question the identities of developers, their role, and their stakes in development and development encounters is a worthwhile endeavor.

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Notes 1. The expression “power NGOs” is used by Frederick (1998) to refer to high-profile, Kathmandu-based NGOs that monopolize international funds and eclipse smaller, rural NGOs. The NGO phenomenon in Nepal, as elsewhere (e.g., Carroll 1992), has been for the most part an urban middle-class one. 2. See, for example, Kondos (1987) on the institution of aphno manche, literally “one’s own people.” Like kinship, aphno manche draws on the language of sacred duty to one’s family relations. 3. This is based on field notes taken at the time. Quotations are verbatim. 4. Nepali term for a salaried office worker. 5. On the growth of ethnic activism, see Gellner (1997); see Phnuyal (1997) on the women’s movement in Nepal after 1990. 6. Jat (literally “species” or ”kind”) is interpreted in English as both “caste” and “ethnic group.” 7. See Adams (1998) on the association of aphno manche with “corruption” in the development era, and Gellner (1997) on how the notion of “communalism,” associated in official discourse with manifestations of “ethnic difference,” acquired its derogatory connotations in colonial times. 8. This bears a strong resemblance to colonial representations of South Asian society (e.g., Dirks 2000). 9. Pardesh, literally “a faraway place,” refers to a place of amorality and of general discomfort. It has similar connotations to the notion of the Outside, a significant concept regarding space throughout the South Asian region (e.g., Chakrabarty 1991; Kaviraj 1997). 10. This joke, Jivan explained the following day, was meant to illustrate BEACON’s policy for launching construction projects: People had to contribute labor. “People,” he continued, “are thinking it would be better if BEACON paid labor charges to them . . . they are bargaining for the project, they want another umbrella for free.” 11. The issue of “politicization” was a sensitive one at the time, and NGOs were quick to deny that they had been unduly influenced by one or the other political party. 12. See, for example, Walls (1996) or Ross (1984) on missionary strategies for “transcending” difference. 13. The field-worker was referring to the practice of citta halne, or sprinkling oneself or another with water for purification. This would

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often happen to staff as they returned from a site: Local shopkeepers would sprinkle water on them to purify them from the pollution gained through their contact with low-caste beneficiaries. 14. The dominant gender customs in these project areas were characterized by the association of women with the domestic sphere (purdah), gender separation, and limitation of women’s mobility, found predominantly among Indo-Aryan groups (Acharya and Bennett 1983).

References Acharya, M., and L. Bennett. 1983. Women and the subsistence sector. Washington, DC: World Bank. Adams, V. 1998. Doctors for democracy: Health professionals in the Nepal revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arce, A., and N. Long. 1993. Bridging two worlds: An ethnography of bureaucrat-peasant relations in western Mexico. In An Anthropological critique of development: The growth of ignorance, edited by M. Hobart. London and New York: Routledge, pp.179–208. Augé, M. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London and New York: Verso. Bierschenk, T, J.P. Chauveau, and J.P. Olivier de Sardan. 2000. Introduction: Les courtiers entre développement et état. In Courtiers en développement: Les villages africains en quête de projets, edited by T. Bierschenk, J.P. Chauveau and J.P.Olivier de Sardan. Paris: Éditions Karthala et APAD. Bista, D.B. 1991. Fatalism and development: Nepal’s struggle for modernization. Calcutta: Orient Longman. Burghart, R. 1994. The political culture of Panchayat democracy. In Nepal in the nineties: Versions of the past, visions of the future, edited by M. Hutt. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–13. Callon, M. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge, edited by J. Law. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 196–233. Carroll, T. 1992. Intermediary NGOs: The supporting link in grassroots development. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Chakrabarty, D. 1991. Open space/public space: Garbage, modernity and India. South Asia 14(1):15–31. Chambers, R. 1997. Whose reality counts? Putting the first last. London: Intermediate Technology.

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Clark, J. 1991. Democratizing development: The role of voluntary organizations. London: Earthscan. Dirks, N.B. 2000. Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frederick, J. 1998 South Asia’s sex trade myths. Himal 11(10):20–23. Gellner, D.N. 1997. Introduction: Ethnicity and nationalism in the world’s only Hindu state. In Nationalism and ethnicity in a Hindu kingdom: The politics of culture in contemporary Nepal, edited by D.N. Gellner, J. Pfaff-Czarnecka, and J. Whelpton. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 3–32. Heaton, C. 2002. NGOs as thekadars or sevak: Identity crisis in Nepal’s non-governmental sector. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 22:5–36. Kaviraj, S. 1997. Filth and the public sphere: Concepts and practices about space in Calcutta. Public Culture 10(1):83–113. Kondos, A. 1987. The question of “corruption” in Nepal. Mankind 17(1):15–29. Latour, B. 1997. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte. Mosse, D. 2004. Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and practice. Development and Change 35(4):639–671. Okada, F.E. 1957. Ritual brotherhood: A cohesive factor in Nepalese society. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13:212–222. Phnuyal, B. 1997. Exploring alternatives to patriarchal pedagogy: An immediate challenge for Nepali mahila mukti andolan. Studies in Nepali History and Society 2(2):306–311. Pigg, S.L. 1992. Inventing social categories through place: Social representations and development in Nepal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34(3):491–513. Ross, A. 1984. John Philip: Missions, race and politics in South Africa. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Tuladhar, A.R. 1994. Naming anti-developmental attitudes. Contributions to Nepalese Studies 21(2):191–212. Van Rooy, A., ed. 1998. Civil society and the aid industry. London: Earthscan. Walls, A.F. 1996. The missionary movement in Christian history: Studies in the transmission of faith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

TEN RETHINKING THE MECHANICS OF THE “ANTI-POLITICS MACHINE”

Tim Bending Sergio Rosendo A certain branch of development theory in the 1990s regarded development as an intervention by “the West” into “the South.” Development was conceptualized as a discourse or a regime imposed upon Third World peoples, with “the West” being constructed as the subject or the agent of this process. This is particularly true of the “post-development” stream of work (Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990; Escobar 1992, 1995, 2000; Ferguson 1990; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; Sachs 1992).1 In this vein, Escobar argues that the discourse of development is “an extremely efficient apparatus for producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World. . . . In sum, it has successfully deployed a regime of government over the Third World, a space for ‘subject peoples’ that ensures certain control over it” (1995: 9). Escobar’s development discourse is, like Said’s “Orientalism,” “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1979: 3). Interestingly, Escobar cites Homi Bhabha’s criticism that “there is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer, given its intentionality and unidirectionality” (Babha 1990: 77). Escobar writes, “This is a danger I seek to avoid by considering the variety of forms with which Third World people resist development interventions and how they struggle to create alternative ways of being and doing” (1995: 11). But here he misses Bhabha’s point that colonization is not the unidirectional exercise of power by the colonizer, but is something that the colonized often co-produces. Escobar, in common with most of the genre, effectively asserts that development is a unidirectional “regime of government” of which the West is subject and accords Third World peoples an active role only outside of development as the producers of resistance and alternatives to development. 217

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Development thus becomes a purely “top-down” process and Third World social movements purely “bottom-up” ones. The implication is that Third World peoples and their movements are an escape route from development to “post-development.” In this chapter we will demonstrate that this political stance is not without its dangers. We will do so with reference, first, to a case study of the Penan of Sarawak, Malaysia, and their movement against logging and its international consequences and, second, to a movement involving the rubber tappers of Brazil. What these cases illustrate is the reproduction of discourses and regimes of development and global environmental management by the very people who are often regarded as the passive objects of these regimes, or sources of resistance to them. They show how actors in the South may often be engaged strategically in tailoring their self-representation to the expectations of more powerful partners. The effect of this is that the discursive assumptions, not to say prejudices, of more powerful actors tend to be confirmed. In the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” the emperor is tricked into believing that he is wearing fine clothes that are visible to everyone but himself. The emperor is sustained in this illusion because everyone he meets, seeing that he believes himself clothed and thinking it in their own interest to tell him what he wants to hear, responds as if he were indeed finely clothed and not naked. In this way the discourse of “the emperor’s clothes” is reproduced and takes on a life of its own. The mechanism we are referring to here is comparable. We will turn first to the case of the Penan, their movement against the Sarawakian timber industry, and their involvement with international environmentalism. Strictly speaking, we are concerned in this instance less with the main regime of development as with the regime constituted by the institutional response to environmental issues. Much of what can be said about development regimes, however, can be said about the sphere of environmental governance. Escobar suggests that the notion of “sustainable development” has promulgated a regime of “environmental managerialism” in which “the Western scientist continues to speak for the Earth” (1995: 194). Drawing on Escobar, Peter Brosius (1999: 38) argues that environmental managerialism and the institutionalization of sustainable development constitute a depoliticizing regime comparable to the process that Ferguson (1990) characterized as an “anti-politics machine.” What the co-production of development discourses by Third World movements suggests is not that they can be dismissed as somehow corrupted, but that we need a more critical awareness of how they operate

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strategically within a discursive field in which notions of development play so dominant a part.

The movement of the Penan The Penan are an indigenous group inhabiting certain interior areas of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. This is an area of moist tropical forests, and traditionally the Penan communities were nomadic. Since the 1980s as few as 300 have remained nomadic, and the remainder, since the 1960s and 1970s, have gradually adopted a settled or semi-settled lifestyle.2 It has been state policy, from the start, to encourage this process. This encouragement has taken a form that can best be described as patron-client relations, with state functionaries portraying the state and the ruling party as benefactors providing for and looking after their peoples through the provision of goods such as schools, mobile health services, and assistance in constructing permanent villages (Bending 2001b, 2005). During this same period commercial logging has made a steady advance across traditional Penan territories. Logging in Sarawak is conducted by Malaysian firms that are either owned by or have close connections with senior figures in the Sarawak state government (Majid-Cooke 1997). Logging methods are nominally selective, as opposed to the use of clear-cutting, and felling has always—officially— been managed toward the goal of sustained yield, the main basis of later claims of sustainability. In practice, logging rates have been unsustainable and regulation ineffective (ITTO 1990; Heyzer 1995), and the use of bulldozers has been particularly destructive, with estimates of the loss of vegetative cover ranging from 6 to over 40 percent (Pearce 1994; SAM 1990). Either extreme is plausible depending on the location and the terrain. The logging companies are almost the only source of employment in the interior. Even in the 1960s, when Penan communities were still largely nomadic, many individuals within them worked for a time in the companies. By the 1980s logging work had become an important part of the livelihood of the more accessible Penan communities. There is, however, an obvious contradiction between logging and the more traditional aspects of Penan lifestyle. Sarawak law effectively designates all land that was primary forest before 1958 as state land, leaving the Penan more or less without land rights (SAM 1990). The land they claim as theirs is almost entirely allocated for logging. Concerns about this issue, expressed in appeals to the government, built gradually as

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logging advanced, coming to a head in the late 1980s with the involvement of both Malaysian and foreign environmentalists. One individual in particular, a Swiss activist called Bruno Manser, played an important role in suggesting that the Penan and a small number of Kenyah, Kelabit, and Kayan communities take more drastic measures, along the lines of the nonviolent direct action (NVDA) approach used by environmental activists in the North. Thus from 1987 these communities enacted a series of logging blockades in which they barricaded logging roads running across their territories. For the Penan participants these actions had rhetorical (as much as practical) significance and should be understood as protests designed to force the state government to listen to their appeals and to take Penan wishes into consideration. In response many promises were made by the state government but few kept. Meanwhile the protests brought considerable disruption to Penan livelihoods, and by 1991 the strategy of blockading had been abandoned by most communities. The center of political conflict over Sarawak’s forests then shifted from local to international contexts that involved competing representations of the protests of the Penan. An important element of this dispute has been the construction of narrative that attributes responsibility for the protests and supports the authenticity (or otherwise) of the Penans’ political voice (Bending 2001a, 2005). The stance of the Malaysian government, generally reflected in the Malaysian media, is to portray the Penan as innocent, naïve, and ignorant of the reality of their situation and of where their real interests lie. They are portrayed as duped by foreign environmentalists to act against the government, even though their real interests lie in cooperating with the government’s efforts to bring them into the mainstream of Malaysian society. One author has accused foreign NGOs of “brainwashing some Penans and others to support the campaign to stop logging in the state” (Chai 1991: 13). Another has written that “the Penan are beginning to feel the effects of Manser’s subtle subversion of their attitudes. Their minds have been infiltrated with a value system, which cannot be the antidote for their current predicament” (Ritchie 1994: 213). Environmentalist campaigns, on the other hand, do by and large present the Penan as responsible subjects of their protests, and direct us to listen to their voices (Davis et al. 1995; Davis and Stenzel 1999; Licht 1989). The Penan, however, are not portrayed as active participants in the modern world but as bearers of an unchanging, ancient ecological

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wisdom that is threatened by the advance of modernity (Bending 2001b; Brosius 1997a; Tsing, 1993). Thus Suzuki (1990: 8) writes, Much of the repository of the working knowledge that our species needs to survive remains in tiny pockets of indigenous peoples who continue to retain a profound sense of connection with the land. . . . There are few people left on earth who are capable of living independently from the rest of the world, neither wanting, nor needing, the “civilised” way of life. . . . As the planet continues to fall before the insatiable demands of global economics, will we wipe out every last vestige of different worldviews? Listen to Dawat [a Penan man]. He is what we once were. He attests to a nobility that we must again become. Penan discourse is seen as valid because it is presented as being unsullied by the evils of modernity; the Penan and only the Penan are constructed as its subjects-agents. In this way environmentalist discourse seems to manufacture its own source of moral authority. Situating the Penan as epistemically outside of the modern world, and in opposition to it, also means that the discursive expression of the Penan is taken at face value, as something essential; it is not problematized as perhaps contingent on a particular social and discursive context. The movement of the Penan thus perhaps represents the archetype of a grassroots movement that challenges the project of development and the rationality of modernization. As presented, they are not part of the apparatus of development, or indeed of modernity, but offer a critique from outside. The subject of modernizing development and the destruction of the rainforest thus becomes “us,” as suggested in Suzuki’s quote above. The subjects of the critique of development are the Penan, who are able to pose this critique and offer alternatives, it is implied, precisely because they are as yet uncorrupted.

The Penan as co-producers of environmentalism This portrayal of the Penan is rather easily undermined. It can be argued that the political message of the Penan is far from being the authentic

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voice of a “last vestige.” Rather, it can be said to represent a particular strategy developed to take advantage of a specific political context. In representing themselves and their views to any visitors assumed to be politically sympathetic, the Penan tend to employ a particular genre of speech making. Indeed, a white foreigner researching in Penan communities is expected always to want to hear this type of speech, the content and rhetoric of which become very familiar. It is usually only the older or more politically active men who feel confident in such performance, especially when a tape recorder is used in an interview. They expect that visiting foreigners will want to record long, oratorical statements by Penan individuals. Individuals who feel they cannot perform up to expectations tend be wary of being questioned or make us of stock responses. These responses range from a simple denial of Penan involvement in the logging industry to the narration of a particular history of Penan relations with the colonial and postcolonial governments. Here the colonial regime is portrayed as a good patron, fulfilling its duties, and the Malaysian/Sarawakian government, implicated in the logging industry, is portrayed as a bad patron, failing to look after its clients. While Malaysian activists working with Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) have provided more concrete, mostly legal, support for the protesting communities, the white foreign activists visiting the area are attributed great symbolic importance by the Penan. They are taken as representatives of white foreign governments concerned for the Penan and continuing to play their role as good patrons who might yet be persuaded to intervene on the their behalf. Peter Brosius, who has also researched the Penan and the environmentalist campaign concerning them, has argued that the existence of this narrative has much to do with the different historical conditions of eastern and western Penan groups and their differing reactions to foreign activists (Brosius 1997b). We have argued elsewhere, however, that we should not underestimate the extent to which this narrative is a retrospective construction and interpretation of those conditions (Bending 2005). It embodies a range of strategic emphases and exclusions, such as the practice of logging in the late colonial period. The narrative seems to have developed principally in the 1980s as way of solemnizing a political alliance, constructing a recent relationship with foreign activists as a return to a semi-fictional “golden age.” In one instance an elderly Penan man even related a syncretic animist-Christian creation myth in which the idealized colonial relationship is seen as being established by God (Bending 2001a: 15–16).

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In this genre descriptions of the failings of the current regime are critically juxtaposed against nostalgic statements about the past. A very heavy emphasis, with a certain amount of exaggeration, is placed on the comparison between a past abundant in natural resources and present conditions of destruction and scarcity. These are not complete fabrications; the loss of natural resources is something the Penan care about deeply. Rather, the point is that this issue is chosen for emphasis and is then rhetorically embellished. Here Moyong, a man with much experience with foreign environmentalists, speaks for the tape recorder: Fish too, its not just Penan who suffer. Fish in the river also suffer; the fishes’ young suffer, because the river is muddy. Sometimes, tuva [a poisonous plant used to kill fish] that is in the forest; when [the loggers] come, that tuva is destroyed, those plants are destroyed, it washes down to the river, and thus, fish die! Some concerns are overstated—as Brosius (1997a) has noted, medicinal plants are emphasized to a degree out of keeping with actual Penan practice—and there are also many strategic silences. The whole episode of Penan experimentation with permanent settlement and forest clearance for agriculture are rarely mentioned. Above all, the surprisingly long history of Penan involvement in logging is not only excluded from the orthodox account but is usually actively denied. Thus it makes sense to see the Penan as engaged in a kind of strategic image management. Li (2000) has noted a similar process of selective and strategic image making among groups in central Sulawesi, Indonesia, engaged against the state in struggles over crucial resources. This is not to say that the discourse represented by this genre of speech making is invented on the spot as an explicitly formulated strategy, but rather that it has developed through the kind of ongoing management of image in which the presentation of (individual or group) identity depends on the audience, something that may be common to community behavior (Cohen 1993). It is a discourse that has been produced in the course of a history of relations with environmentally minded foreign activists, and it is intelligible as a strategic response to those relations. Given the extent to which such speech is directed at foreigners, it should come as no surprise that it seems to be represented in international environmentalist representations of the Penan. A good example is Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rainforest (Davis and Henley 1990), which

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embodies a statement by a Penan man called Dawat Lupung recorded by the authors on a short visit to Sarawak. It appears to be an excellent example of the speech making previously described: The water muddy, the fish dead. Can’t drink the water anymore, muddy, terrible, no good. We don’t like this. (54) Long ago during the British times, hitting—there was none of that. Penan were happy living in the headwaters. . . . Now, the government gets angry with us. . . . Dead, dead, alive, alive. It is decided by the government. They don’t know how to think like humans, don’t know how to help people, people who are suffering, people who are poor. (74–81) In the absence of in-depth research the impression any visitor receives will reflect this strand of Penan discourse. Indeed, environmentalist representations of the Penan do seem to have been considerably influenced by Penan self-representations. If the Penan had consistently said, “We want the government to respect our lifestyle and leave us a substantial area of forest, but we don’t mind logging elsewhere and we still want jobs with the logging companies,” the reaction of foreign environmentalists might have been very different. It is this process that can be likened to telling the emperor he is clothed. The price of international support for the Penan has been the necessity to conform to the stereotypes of “Western” discourse. The norms of Penan public speaking seem to have been tailored over time to what foreign activists have been pleased to hear. In acting this part the Penan have helped reproduce Western discourses about “the Other,” the “noble savage,” and so on. More specifically, they have helped reproduce a particular environmentalist agenda that is primarily concerned with forest preservation. The original motive behind the protests might be described as concern of the Penan with just treatment for themselves, including better provision of government patronage as well as respect for traditional land rights, rather than with the preservation of forest per se. This is a struggle over who has the right to decide what happens to the forest the Penan claim.

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From land rights to ‘sustainability’ This process, in which actors conform to and thus reproduce the discursive expectations of more powerful allies, is politically consequential and occurs at many levels. In this case environmental activists also had audiences to perform to. By the end of the 1980s the case of the Penan became something of a cause célèbre in international environmentalist circles, something to which the Malaysian state and logging interests had to respond. The story of this international campaign and counter-campaign is described in detail by Peter Brosius (1999), and so here it is recounted only in summary. The campaign outside Sarawak initially focused on the Penan and their protests, arrests, and trials. It was in this period that the environmentalist representations described above were produced. The case was presented as a black-and-white moral issue, with the Penan cast as the defenders of the forest pitched against the Malaysian government and loggers as its destroyers. The solution sought was a halt to logging and the creation of something of a “Penan Biosphere Reserve” that would preserve the rainforest and allow the Penan to continue a traditional way of life (Davis and Henley 1990). While this discursive preoccupation with conservation values and the romantic portrayal of an indigenous people successfully generated international environmentalist interest, to win concessions the campaign had to appeal to a broader discursive context. It was attacked by the Malaysian state, media, and timber industry lobby as a kind of eco-imperialism, in which the South was being scapegoated for the problems caused by the high consumption of the North (Mahathir Mohamed and Lutzenberger 1992). According to Brosius (1999), this argument was actually quite persuasive with Malaysian environmentalists (Khor Kok Peng 1991); indeed, it fit well with that strand of environmentalist discourse that was internationalist in sentiment and critical of the North’s industrialism and consumption. This contributed to a general shift in rainforest-related campaigning in the early 1990s away from attacking the direct agents of deforestation and toward the less hypocrisy-prone policy of boycotting tropical timber products. In this new context, however, environmentalist groups had to accept that if timber could be produced according to a set of sustainability criteria, then its consumption was permissible. Fearing the effects of reduced consumption, the Malaysian government and timber industry also accepted and began to promote the sustainability agenda, arguing that forestry in Malaysia had always been sustainably

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managed. Efforts to establish a timber certification scheme brought into play an extensive multilateral institutional network involving organizations such as the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) and the World Bank, industry and producer country representatives, donor organizations, and environmental NGOs. It also necessitated and brought into being an international apparatus of forest governance and surveillance. This apparent consensus on timber certification shifted the political debate to the question of what should count as criteria and indicators of sustainability. In this process NGOs have argued for the inclusion of criteria such as impact on local communities while actors such as the Malaysian government and the ITTO have sought a focus on such considerations as sustainable yield management, ideas of scientific forestry, and the economic costs of adherence to sustainability criteria. These debates occur in a particular institutional and principally technocratic context; one in which NGOs nominally representing the interests of people like the Penan have to try and reach a negotiated agreement with very powerful actors like the Malaysian government. Many environmental NGOs have withdrawn support from the process in frustration over the exclusion of more radical concerns and out of a desire to avoid legitimizing the regime being set up. What is apparent here is that the Penan have first had to adopt and help reproduce the discourse of romantic environmentalism in order to secure an alliance with foreign environmentalist NGOs, and those same NGOs in turn adopt and help reproduce the discursive mantle of “sustainability” and technocratic sustainable resource management. To put it crudely, the less powerful actors at whatever level have been forced to speak the language of the more powerful in order to be heard and to have some degree of influence. The overall effect is that the discourse dominant in those institutions and contexts in which power is centralized tends to be reproduced; the emperor is repeatedly told that he is clothed and so remains content in this belief. Another apparent effect is the concentration of power. In the case of the Penan, their original struggle may roughly be understood to have demanded that they decide what happens to their forests. It was a reaction to the usurpation of that control by the Sarawak state government. This demand was transmuted first into a demand for blanket preservation of forest, and then into one that the forest be sustainably managed according to some criteria decided in distant centers of power. The effect is that decision making is taken from the Penan and replaced by an apparatus of global environmental management.

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This is an ongoing process, and as yet, in fact, it has had little effect on forestry in Sarawak. The case of the Penan might be said to be rather far removed from the more typical development context, but in the overall pattern of effects it can be said to be similar. To support this claim we wish briefly to provide another example that is again connected with environmentalism but is closer to the classic development scenario.

Rubber tappers: from land rights to conservation The rubber tappers of Amazonia represent another cause célèbre of the international environmentalist movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The rubber tappers are an extractivist community dependent for their livelihood on access to mature forest from which to harvest non-timber forest products, including wild rubber. The importance of Brazilian rubber production declined after the Second World War (Weinstein 1983; Dean 1987), and government policy toward Amazonia shifted to the encouragement of other forms of economic development, with road building paving the way for increased mining, cattle ranching, logging, and settlement by migrant farmers (Mahar 1989; Goodman and Hall 1990). In the 1970s these activities put the forest used by rubber tapper communities increasingly under threat, the rubber tappers having no secure form of land tenure. In the state of Acre in particular, this led to often violent conflict as cattle ranchers evicted rubber tapper families. In response the rubber tappers developed a tactic known as empate, or standoff, in which families would assemble to confront the teams hired by cattle ranchers to clear the forest. This tactic became emblematic of a growing rubber tappers’ movement (Hecht and Cockburn 1989). Prior to 1985 this movement’s main external links were with the Catholic Church, with rural unions, and with the Brazilian Worker’s Party. As a result, during this period the rubber tappers’ struggle for land rights was framed within a discourse concerning social justice and particularly the issue of agrarian reform (Keck 1995). In the 1980s, however, environmentalism came to represent an alternative source of opportunities. There was mounting international concern over tropical deforestation, and development finance was criticized as one of its driving forces. US-based environmentalists initiated a campaign against, among other things, the Northeast Brazil Integrated Development Program (POLONOROESTE), funded by the World Bank in Amazonia (Rich 1994). The rubber tappers’ struggle

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attracted the attention of NGO activists and became increasingly publicized in international environmentalist circles. This gave representatives of the rubber tappers an unprecedented degree of influence, or at least access. Their leader, Chico Mendes, was able to lobby the US Congress and World Bank staff directly. Within this conjuncture, the rubber tappers developed a proposal for the creation of special protected areas called extractive reserves that would legalize their traditional forest occupancy rights. The alliance with the rubber tappers allowed environmentalists to frame their demands not simply as promoting conservation but also as aiding oppressed people and as a development alternative to combat poverty, the latter playing particularly well with development institutions like the World Bank. For the rubber tappers, the alliance meant a shift in presentational emphasis from social justice and land rights to forest conservation and sustainable development. Rubber tappers’ organizations have been very flexible in the aspect of extractive reserves they emphasize according to the agenda of the actors whose support they are seeking (Rosendo 2002). Extractive reserves have been promoted mainly as “alternative forms of resource management that will promote social well-being while preserving the environment” (Allegretti 1990: 251). The original focus on rights to land appears to have lost ground to a more value-neutral framing that gives the impression that extractive reserves are merely a technical measure to promote sustainable development. This environmentalist agenda came to be well represented in multilateral interventions in Amazonia, particularly through the implementation of major environmental management projects (Redwood 2002). Some of these, such as the World Bank–administered Pilot Program for the Conservation of the Brazilian Rainforest (funded by the G7, the EU, and the German government) and the World Bank–funded Rondônia Natural Resources Management Project (PLANAFLORO), included the establishment of extractive reserves as an objective. This has meant that extractive reserves, particularly in Rondônia, have often become “topdown” policy measures implemented in the name of rubber tappers, but for whom the outcomes have been mixed. As Rosendo (2002, 2003) describes, while they have given collective land rights, some of the reserves created under PLANAFLORO have caused tensions with some residents wishing to pursue land use options forbidden by the conservation-oriented management plans. These reserves are nominally managed cooperatively by local associations of rubber tappers; but since, in the case of Rondônia, the impetus and funding for this local

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level of organization came from external donors, little sense of collective responsibility and ownership over the reserves has developed, and for many of their inhabitants the management rules seem an unjustified imposition. In extreme cases it could be said that the implementation of extractive reserves represents the de facto instantiation of discourses concerning sustainable development and environmental management, which rubber tappers in Rondônia have been asked to “rubber-stamp.” The leaders of local associations are placed in the difficult position of having to “broker” this relationship between the competing agendas of external donor organizations and reserve residents. In a manner reminiscent of the project field-workers described by Rossi (Chapter 2, this volume), they have to provide the residents with a strategic rationale for conforming to donor priorities. As with the Penan, the rubber tappers found that establishing an alliance with actors within international environmentalism and with powerful institutions like the World Bank required the strategic adoption of environmentalist and sustainable development discourse. This strategic use of particular discursive forms must also be seen as a way in which those forms are reproduced and sustained; the rubber tappers have constituted an often-cited example of sustainable development in practice. It is also important here to note that it is the less powerful actors that seek to conform to the expectations of the more powerful. By “power” we really refer to relative bargaining strength, the question of who needs whom the most. It is clearly not the case that internationally mobile environmentalists and World Bank staff members so need to enlist the support of the rubber tappers that they have to adapt themselves to the rubber tappers’ agenda; rather, it is the other way around. The case of the rubber tappers has a similar trajectory to that of the Penan. The initial struggle entailed rubber tappers’ efforts to maintain control over the forest they regarded as theirs. Toward this end they enlisted the support of environmentalist NGOs and eventually multilateral donor institutions, but at the price of losing a degree of the control for which they were originally fighting. As Li (2000) notes, there are risks associated with reconstituting identities in the context of wider relations and connections. Rural groups presenting themselves in a way that fits ambiguously with their lives and livelihoods may create room to maneuver in the short term, only to find that room reduced in the long run. Extractive reserves have often secured collective land tenure at the cost of conforming to the sustainable resource management agenda of external funders (rather than their own), particularly in Rondônia, where the grassroots movement was less developed.

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Conclusion In The Anti-Politics Machine, James Ferguson argues that “development institutions generate their own form of discourse, and this discourse simultaneously constructs Lesotho as a particular kind of object of knowledge and creates a structure of knowledge around that object. Interventions are then organized on the basis of this structure of knowledge” (1990: xiv). These interventions regularly fail in terms of their stated objectives, and they do so precisely because development institutions seem able to deceive themselves as to the reality of the situations in which they are intervening. Despite this failure, Ferguson notes that these interventions do have regular effects. These include “the expansion and entrenchment of bureaucratic state power, side by side with the projection of a representation of economic and social life which denies ‘politics’ and, to the extent that it is successful, suspends its effects” (1990: xiv–xv). In this way the development apparatus can be seen as, de facto, not an antipoverty machine but an anti-politics machine, in that it may have no effect on poverty, but its depoliticization and propagation of state power appear to be systematic. Ferguson is quite clear in suggesting that these are accidental effects and “not any kind of conspiracy; it really does just happen to be the way things work out.” Yet he also suggests that these effects make it “less mysterious why ‘failed’ development projects should end up being replicated again and again. It is perhaps reasonable to suggest that it may even be because development projects turn out to have such uses, even if they are in some sense unforeseen, that they continue to attract so much interest and support” (Ferguson 1990: 256). There is a contradiction here: Are these effects intended or are they not? Ferguson’s difficulty relates to the way he constructs development, in common with other development critiques from what Grillo (1997) calls the “Development Dictionary perspective,” as an intervention by the West into the South. In The Anti-Politics Machine the subjects-agents of development interventions and development knowledge are “development institutions” and “planners,” and not the people of Lesotho, the Lesotho government, or any group, faction, or particular set of actors engaged in brokering this development relationship. Development comes across as something that intervenes in Lesotho for its own reasons, and as something the government and various actors of Lesotho simply go along with. Because the planners of Western development institutions are the only ones constructed as the subjects of this intervention, the idea that effects characterized as “failures” are actually intended would amount to saying there was a “conspiracy.”

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But in Lesotho there clearly are beneficiaries of these development “failures,” not least actors at various levels of the Lesotho government. If such actors could be seen as having some influence over the instigation of development interventions, then the intelligibility of these interventions as a strategy of depoliticization and the entrenchment of state power would indeed become less mysterious. A clue to how this occurs, in fact, is to be found in Ferguson’s analysis of how development discourse is produced. He notes that the authors of a document such as the World Bank Country Report on Lesotho (1975) are brokers tailoring their representation to conform to the organization’s premises, and in doing so they reinforce and reproduce their existence. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a whole range of actors seeking to present Lesotho as just the sort of “promising candidate” for development intervention that institutions are looking for. These individual strategies would not add up to a conspiracy, but would have the systemic effects that Ferguson describes. The analogy of the emperor’s new clothes may have quite broad applicability. One obvious example is the practice of “participation.” As David Mosse has indicated, such practice may create a social situation to which people respond strategically, intending not to inform so much as to influence: Many community leaders . . . are well aware of the benefits to be gained not only from projecting private interests as public ones but from doing so in such a way that the priorities of projects and their funders are met or “triggered.” In this sense “environment,” “gender” and “poverty” (global development priorities) are very much part of the “public” knowledge building in community development projects. (Mosse 1994: 510) Various other examples are detailed by other contributors to this book. Benedetta Rossi (Chapter 2), in particular, describes locally powerful state actors using subservience to donor paradigms as a strategy for entrenching their authority. She also describes project field staff brokering the relationship between villagers and project administrators, assisting the former to present themselves as “appropriate beneficiaries” and thus gain access to project spending. These strategies of the villagers and project field staff thus also help to sustain the rationales informing the project. Salemink (Chapter 5), on the other hand, describes how international

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NGOs have had to support their work in Vietnam, which has the effect of strengthening state actors, by translating it and presenting it according to the rather contrary objectives demanded by their constituencies in Holland. Peter Luetchford (Chapter 6) examines how the success of Costa Rican coffee producers in securing “fair trade” markets depends on successfully conforming to a discourse that identifies themselves as suitable beneficiaries of European consumer benevolence. Wiebe Nauta (Chapter 7) describes an NGO engaged in similar “strategic translation,” seeking to secure legitimacy in changing contexts. In the case of the Penan and the rubber tappers, we see movements engaged in local struggles over land rights in which they seek, and eventually secure, the intervention of actors at an international level. This, again, involves telling the emperor that he is clothed. The effects of these interventions, a timber certification regime and conservationoriented extractive reserves (justified by the discourses the Penan and the rubber tappers helped to reproduce), are not exactly what was originally fought for. But in both cases securing some kind of intervention from the international level was seen as better than losing the local struggle outright. We thus have a different narrative of how the development regime and discourse are produced—one in which actors and movements in the South also play a role, but not simply for the reason that development, as defined by the discourse, is what they “really want.” This obviously has a bearing on the “post-development” turn to movements as a source of alternatives. It does not mean that we should not pay attention to movements or should not be supportive of them—far from it. But it does mean that we should read the self-expression of social movements critically as strategic responses to certain discursive, geopolitical situations. Just as the Penan and the rubber tappers made use of “Western” environmentalist and sustainable development discourse, so, we would expect, have many movements called for change in the name of “development” in discursive/political contexts where “development” has represented an unalloyed good. We can see also that if being anti-development became politically useful, then movements might call for change in the name of an “alternative to development.” Perhaps this is already happening. Any intervention by, for example, northern NGOs to help social movements in the name of “alternatives to development” obviously risks repeating just the type of anti-politics mechanism that Ferguson described under the name “development.” First, the construction of development as a unidirectional imposed regime and social movements as representing unidirectional resistance

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to that regime risks treating any movement that expresses itself through the idiom of development as just a pawn of the development regime. Instead we must read this as a legitimate strategic move in a context in which the discourse of development is hegemonic. Second, we must be wary of taking the self-presentation of a movement at face value just because it conforms to our expectations; we do not want people to tell us that we are clothed if we are not. What we should really be paying attention to is the counter-hegemonic moment, the political response to an anti-politics machine, the moment when someone says, “The emperor has no clothes!” This is surely the type of engagement Ferguson is calling for when, under the heading “What should we do?” he speaks of using anthropological expertise politically at home and finding “counter-hegemonic alternative points of engagement” abroad. The status of “counter-hegemonic” depends, as he says, “always on an analysis of local context” (1990: 287), the point being that any discourse or institutional apparatus may be hegemonic in a given context, as the examples of political tensions in extractive reserves (Rosendo 2003) and Penan communities (Bending 2005) would seem to suggest.

Notes 1. Tim Bending wishes to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Sergio Rosendo’s work is part of the interdisciplinary research program of the ESRC-funded Programme on Environmental Decision Making (PEDM) at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia. 2. There are two Penan subgroups, the “Eastern” and “Western,” with notable linguistic, cultural, and historical differences (Needham 1972; Brosius 1997a, 1997b; Langub 1991). The protesting communities were all from the Eastern subgroup, and it is these that are routinely referred to as simply “Penan” in the various representations of the case. We have followed this practice for the sake of simplicity. The figure of 9237 for the Penan population (Eastern and Western) was computed by Jayl Langub (1989) from 1985, 1987, and 1988 census figures.

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References Allegretti, M.H. 1990. Extractive reserves: An alternative for reconciling development and environmental conservation in Amazonia. In Alternatives to deforestation: Steps towards sustainable use of the Amazon rain forest, edited by A.B. Anderson. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 252–264. Apffel-Marglin, F., and S. Marglin, eds. 1990. Dominating knowledge: Development, culture and resistance. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bending, T. 2001a. Telling stories: Representing the anti-logging movement of the Penan of Sarawak. European Journal of Development Research 13(2):1–25. Bending, T. 2001b. The politics of the subject: Reading change in the case of the Penan. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of East Anglia. Bending, T. 2005. Penan histories: The narration of change in opriver Sarawak. Leiden, Netherlands: KITLV Press, forthcoming. Bhabha, H. 1990. The other question: Difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism. In Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures, edited by R. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brosius, J.P. 1997a. Endangered forest, endangered people: Environmentalist representations of indigenous knowledge. Human Ecology 25(1):47–69. Brosius, J.P. 1997b. Prior transcripts, divergent paths: Resistance and acquiescence to logging in Sarawak, East Malaysia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 39(3):468–510. Brosius, J.P. 1999. Green dots, pink hearts: Displacing politics from the Malaysian rain forest. American Anthropologist 101(1):36–57. Chai, L. 1991. Environmental issues relating to logging and adverse publicity by non-governmental organisations. Sarawak Gazette 118(1518): 5–16. Cohen, A. 1993. Segmentary knowledge: A Whalsey sketch. In An anthropological critique of development: The growth of ignorance, edited by M. Hobart. London: Routledge, pp. 31–42. Davis, W., and T. Henley, eds. 1990. Penan: Voice for the Borneo rainforest. Vancouver: Western Canada Wilderness Committee. Davis, W., I. Mackenzie, and S. Kennedy. 1995. Nomads of the dawn: The Penan of the Borneo rainforest. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks. Davis, W., and M. Stenzel (photog.). 1999. Vanishing cultures. National Geographic (August):62–89.

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Dean, W. 1987. Brazil and the struggle for rubber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Escobar, A. 1992. Reflections on “development”: Grassroots approaches and alternative politics in the Third World. Futures 24(5):411–436. Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Escobar, A. 2000. Beyond the search for a paradigm? Post-development and beyond. Development 43(4):11–14. Ferguson, J. 1990. The anti-politics machine: Development, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, D., and A. Hall. 1990. The future of Amazonia: Destruction or sustainable development? London: Macmillan. Grillo, R.D. 1997. Discourses of development: The view from anthropology. In Discourses of development: Anthropological perspectives, edited by R.L. Stirrat and R.D. Grillo. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp. 1–34. Hecht, S., and A. Cockburn. 1989. The fate of the forest: Developers, destroyers and defenders of the Amazon. London: Penguin Books. Heyzer, N. 1995. Gender, population and environment in the context of deforestation: A Malaysian case study. IDS Bulletin 26(1):40–46. ITTO. 1990. The promotion of sustainable forest management: A case study in Sarawak, Malaysia. Yokohama: International Tropical Timber Organisation. Keck, M.E. 1995. Social equity and environmental politics in Brazil: Lessons from the rubber tappers of Acre. Comparative Politics 27(4):409–424. Khor Kok Peng, M. 1991. What UNCED must do to resolve the forest crisis. Third World Resurgence 10:23–24. Langub, J. 1989. Some aspects of life of the Penan. Sarawak Museum Journal n.s., 40(61):169–184. Langub, J. 1991. Penan response to change and development. Paper presented at the Conference on Interactions of Peoples and Forests in Kalimantan, New York, June 21–23. Li, T.M. 2000. Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: Resource politics and the tribal slot. Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(1):149–179. Licht, A. 1989. Why do they steal our land? The Penan people of Sarawak and the devastating effects of economic development. AMPO Japan-Asia Quarterly Review 21(2–3):42–45.

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INDEX

appointment of in Costa Rican coffee industry, 130 competence, demonstrating, 180–181 dress codes, 184 establishing trust, 178–179, 180 formal education, 184 identities of, 177–178, 182 knowledge acquisition by, 181 professional identity of as an expert, 180 self-descriptions, 183 training, 181 transfer of information from research to farmer, 182–183 village perceptions of, 180 women as, 184–185 Agricultural supervisor (AS), characteristics of, 178, 189 Agro-Economic Consultancy (CAE), 129 Alternative development, 3 vs. alternatives to development, 4, 232 Alternative trade system, 139–140, 144 Altruism, 141, 142, 143 Altruist paradigm, 143 Anonymous automaticity of the machine, 5 Anonymous control, 54 Anthropological involvement, contemporary approaches to, 5–9

Abbreviations and acronyms, list of, ix–xii Action research strategy, 109, 111, 112, 113, 116. See also Participatory development Actor network theory (ANT), 14 Actor-oriented approaches to development, 9–11, 46 Africa. See also individual countries by name civil servants, schizophrenic situation of, 47 role of development brokers in, 12 African National Congress (ANC), 153 Agricultural development projects, 173–193 agricultural extension, identity and knowledge in, 177–186 extension agents, 175, 176–186 frontline demonstration schemes, 180 knowledge as a resource in organizational negotiations, 186–188 views of, 174–177 rationales for, 176 time, challenges of, 179–180 Agricultural extension agent(s), 175 actions of, resistances to and rationalization of, 176–177, 186–187 agricultural experience of, 181, 183 and agricultural scientist compared, 190 239

240

INDEX

Anthropology applied vs. academic, 21 contemporary context of, 5–9 deconstructive approach to development, 4–5, 149 and development, relationship between, 1–2 instrumental approach to development, 2–3, 149 interactionalist tradition of, 2 Manchester school of, 9, 11, 12 populist approach to development, 3–4, 149, 150 as transnational connection, 2 Antidesertification interventions, 31 Anti-developmental attitudes, 201–204 Anti-politics machine, 217–237 defined, 218 political response to, 232, 233 The Anti-Politics Machine, 230 APAD. See Association euro-Africaine pour l’anthropolgie du changement sociale et du développement (APAD) Apartheid, 151, 152, 153, 156 Aphno manche, 195, 201–202, 209–210, 213, 214 Asian Development Bank, 6, 105, 106 Asian values, 70 Assistant Agricultural Officers (AAOs), 180 Association euro-Africaine pour l’anthropolgie du changement sociale et du développement (APAD), 12 Authority for Village Development and Protection (Jawatankuasa Kemajuan dan Keselamatan Kampung, or JKKK), 60 Authorless strategies, 54

Bending, Tim, xv, 20, 217 Beneficiaries and benefactors, dichotomy between, 114, 115 building good relations with, 207 consumer practices of, 4 as participants in development, 67–70 as people for whom difference matters, 211 perspective of on development, 20 positioning selves as appropriate, 231 sensitization and, 28 as tradition bound, 211 Benin, rural land plan (Plan Foncier Rural, or PFR) in, 17–18, 75–99 Bhabha, Homi, 20, 146, 217 Bikas, 19, 200 Bio-power, 92–93 Black-boxing, 15 Black spot communities, 155, 170 Bottleneck model of communication, 111, 112 Bottom-up approach to development, 3, 66, 67, 102, 104, 106, 108, 114, 115, 116, 120, 122, 218 Bracketing, 20, 208–212 Brazil, rubber tappers in, 20, 227–229 Bridging, 213 Brokerage, 11–13, 16 Brokers, 2, 10, 11–13, 46, 62–64 Brosius, Peter, 218, 222, 223, 225 Bumiputra, 57–58, 60 Callon, Michael, 76 Carlos, Juan, 134 Carrier, James, 142 Caste, 201, 209, 213, 214 Catholic Church, 133 social doctrine of, 133–134, 141, 145

INDEX

Chambers, Robert, 3, 53, 113 Change-awareness campaigns, 65 CILSS (Comité permanent Inter Etats de Lutte Contre la Sécheresse au Sahel), 30 Ciskei, 152, 160, 169 Citta halne, 214–215 CIVICUS, 123 Civil society, 8, 18 concept, history of, 103 definitions of, 103–104, 121 INGOs and, in Vietnam, 103–107 study of in Vietnam, 101–126 Civil society organizations, 119 Clothing, as status symbol, 59–60, 184 Club du Sahel, 31 Colonization, 20, 217 Commodization, 11, 175 Common resources, management of, 162 Communication models bottleneck, 111, 112 sand-clock, 111 Competitive spirit, 69 Composition, 14 Connectivity, 144 Consensus, nature of, 90 Consulting agencies, 174–175 Coocafé consortium, 129, 130–132 Coopabuena, 131 Coope Llanco Bonito, 131 Cooperative work groups, 64 Coopesanta Elena, 131 “Costa Pobre,” 134 Costa Rica, fair trade in coffee economy of, 127–146 Agro-Economic Consultancy (CAE), 129 coffee prices, fluctuation of, 136–138 Coocafé consortium, 129, 130–132 cooperative managers, role of, 127–128

241

cooperative movement, evolution of, 129–132, 135, 145 European partners, relationships with, 140 the gift, ideology and politics of, 141–143 market access, 18–19, 129, 136, 232 political movements and moral motivations, 132–136 reformist movement in, 134 regulations regarding coffee industry, 135 relations between coffee cooperatives and fair trade organizations, 139–141 solidarity, 132–133, 138, 141 transnational connections and alternative trade, 136–139 Costa Rican Coffee Institute (Icafè), 131 Costa Rican Federation of Coffee Cooperatives (Fedecoop), 129, 131 Counter-hegemonic alternative points of engagement, 233 Coutiers en Développement, 1 Crawford, G., 7–8 Culture of dependency, 162, 201 Datuk Sukarti, 59–63, 65 Decentralized despotism, 153 Deconstructive approach to development, 4–5, 146 Deforestation, 225 Desai, Bina, xv, 19, 173 Desertification (Keita Project), 30–34 converting local men and women to fight against, 34 described, 31–32 peasant’s role in, 33, 34 politics of, 33–34 project staff, 34–35 sensitization and, 34–41 social discouragement and, 32–33

242

INDEX

Development actor-oriented approaches, 9–11, 46 alternatives to, 4, 232 anthropological involvement with in a contemporary context, 5–9 deconstructive approach to, 4–5, 149 instrumental approach to, 2–3, 149 need for changes in, 1–2 populist approach to, 3–4, 149, 150 beneficiaries of, as participants in, 67–70 bottom-up approaches to, 3, 66, 67, 102, 104, 106, 108, 114, 115, 116, 120, 122, 218 brokerage and brokers in, 11–13, 62 buzzwords, 8 contested nature of, 187 depoliticizing effects of, 54 as discourse, 4 “the emperor’s clothes” analogy of, 218, 231 engagement of local people in planning process of, 66, 67, 69 ethnography of, 12–13, 15–17, 21 gender differences in perception of, 46–47 instrument-effect of, 53–54 local perceptions of, 41–45 personal dimensions of, 22 political consequences of, 51–52 poverty alleviation as goal of, 67 as practice, 21 projects, social life of, 9 sustainable, 218 theoretical models of, 9–17 top-down approaches to, 84, 106, 114, 116, 218

translation and networks, 13–17 Developmentalist configuration, 13 Development “cover crop,” 65 “Development Dictionary perspective,” 230 Development intervention, as a social interface, 78 Development workers. See also Agricultural extension agent(s); Field workers and beneficiaries, similarity to, 202 educational levels of, 202 English-speaking, importance of, 200 field office (FO) staff, characteristics of, 202–204 frontline, 19 morals and behavior of, 200 and recipients, relationships with, 22, 27 real-life situations of, 3 self-perceived roles, 199–200 and sensitization of recipients, 27–30 women, 202 Discursive determinism, 14 Donor-recipient relations, 5 Doolittle Amity, xv, 17, 51 Drought. See Desertification Earth Summit (1992), 104 Ecological degradation, and social discouragement, 32–33 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 233 Embedded tale defined, 150, 167 and internal organizational history, 154 value of, 168 Empowerment, 3, 8, 6, 67

INDEX

Environmentalism, international intervention into Penan, opposition to logging, 219–227 rubber tappers of Amazonia, 227–229 Environmental managerialism, 218 Epistemization, 174 Erosion, 40 Escobar, A., 4, 217 Essentialism, 190 Ethnic activism, 214 Ethnographic research, 1, 168. See also Moti Rural Association (as example of) Ethnography of development, 12–13, 15–17, 21, 143 Euro-African Association for the Anthropology of Social Change and Development, 12 Externalization, 77 Fair trade advantages/disadvantages of, 138 as alternative market, 139 Costa Rican coffee economy as example of, 18, 127–148 effects of, 140 hiatus between the commercial and ethical in, 18 history of in Costa Rica, 136–137 market access, 18–19, 129, 136, 232 populism and, 144 products, motivation to consume, 142–143, 146 Famine, 40 Farming systems research (FSR), 174, 189 Fedecoop. See Costa Rican Federation of Coffee Cooperatives Ferguson, Adam, 103

243

Ferguson, James, 4, 51, 53–54, 150, 230, 233 Field workers. See also Development workers bracketing differences, 20, 208–212 isolation of, 204–206 rapport-building among, 206–207 scrutiny of by beneficiaries, 207–208 technical competence, 207 trust and morality, 206–208 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 30 Food-for-work rations, 33, 34, 37, 41 Foreign experts, dependence on, 115 Foucault, M., 4, 6, 77 French Development Agency (AFD), 78, 79 Friendship Official, between nations, 106–107 organizations, 110, 116 Vietnamese notions of, 107 Gallawater A, delivery experiences in, 157–159 Gardner, Katy, 187 Gasela farm (South Africa), study of, 160–167 Gasela Proposal to the Department of Land Affairs, 160 Gender and Development (GAD) policies, 42 Gender awareness training (GAT), in Besgaum, Nepal, 197–199 Gender balance, 211 Gender differences, in local perceptions of development, 41–45 Gender equality, 122 Gender equity, 106 Gender mainstreaming, 106, 202 Gender separation, 215

244

INDEX

Gerakan Desa Wawasan (Malaysia), 53 Gestion des terroirs, 88–89 Gift, concept of, 141–143, 146 Gomez, Alvaro, 134, 136, 140 GONGO (government-organized NGO), 103 “Good governance,” 2, 7, 18, 104, 199 Good will, 141 Governance reform, 6–7 Governmentality, 22 fair trade as exercise in, 141 Foucault’s concept of, 6, 59, 91, 92 and governance compared, 92 Graebner, David, 142, 143, 146 Gray, Michael, 118, 119 Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) program, South Africa, 156 Growth mania, 53 GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit), 79 Habitus, 47 Harriss, John, 180 Heaton Shrestha, Celayne, xv, 19, 184, 195 Human Development Index, 123 Ideological deconstructivism, 4–5 Ideological populism, 3, 4 Ideology of extension, 174 Ijjat, 207, 210 Indigenous knowledge, 3, 29, 78, 84 Individual autonomy, 133, 134 Inducing aspirations, 36 INGOs (international NGOs) and domestic NGOs, 106 growth in, 105–106 special significance of in Vietnam, 102, 103–107 Inspirational phrases, 65

Institute of Land Development (Malaysia), 56 Institute of Regional Development (Malaysia), 56 Institution, defined, 93 Institutional knowledge systems, 5 Institutional technology transfer, 78–80 Instrumental approach to development, 2–3, 149 Instrumental rationality, 5 Instrument-effect development, 53–54 Integrated Rural Development Projects, 31 Interface(s), 10, 27, 29, 41, 46 International Coffee Agreement (ICO), 136 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 101, 104, 106 International Tropical Timber Organization (ITIO), 226 Intervention, concept of, 10 Islamic values, 54, 55–56, 58–59, 70 Jacob, Jean-Pierre, 92 Jat, 201, 209, 210, 214 Keita Project, 31–34. See also Niger, aid policies and recipient strategies in Kemajuan Masyarakat, 56 Knowledge commodization of, 175 common-sense vs. scientific, 177 consumption, 174 as equivalent to information, 174 growth of, 177 indigenous, 3, 29, 78, 84 local, 3, 29, 78, 173 and power, 76 practical, 180 production, 8, 174 scientific, 4, 19, 173, 174, 177

INDEX

as a set of practices, 175 as system, 173 transfer of, 19, 180–181, 182–183 world ordering, 4 worlds of, 27, 28, 47 Knowledge translation. See Translation Knowledge worlds, compartmentalization of, 114 “Laboratorisation of the world,” 76 Land clearing, as a gentleman’s agreement, 89–90 Land Reform Program, South Africa, 170 Land rights struggles, international intervention in Penan, opposition to logging, 219, 227, 232 rubber tappers of Amazonia, 227–229, 232 Land tenure knowing and ordering, Rural Land Plan (Benin) as method of, 76–78, 85 security, 93 Landscaping, 61 Latin American Coffee Producers Solidarity Campaign, 131 Latour, Bruno, 2, 8, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 76, 175 Leadership, problems with, 162–163 Learning-by-doing approach to development, 116 Leimbach, Berthold, 130 Le Meur, Pierre-Yves, xv, 17, 75 Lesotho, study of development in, 4, 54, 230–231 Lewis, David, xv, 1 Lifeworlds, 28–29, 46, 47 Lineage territory, 89–90 Local knowledge, 3, 29, 78, 173 Long, Norman, 9, 11

245

Luetchford, Peter, xv, 18, 127, 232 Lukes, S., 6 Mahathir, Mohamud, 52, 55–56 Malaysia, politics of development in, 17, 51–74 beneficiaries of development, 67– 70 beneficiary perspective on development, 20 brokers of development, 62–64 bumiputra, 57–58, 60 clothing as status symbol, 59–60 entrepreneurial class in, 57 ethnicity in, 55–56, 58 Gerakan Desa Waswasan (GDW), 53 identity, role of fragmented federal/state politics in, 56–59, 70 ideological context of development, 52–56 Internal Securities Act, 67 Islamic values, 54, 55–56, 58–59, 70 Kadazan nationalism, 58, 71 Kemas organization, 56, 59, 63 Malay-Muslim population, 17, 58, 59, 68, 71 modernity, arrival of, 59–65 money politics, 57, 63, 71 New Economic Plan (NEP), 56–57 Penan opposition to logging, 218, 219–227 political patronage, 51 rural development, hidden meanings behind, 58–59 spiritual awareness, 55 theater of development, 65–67 village beautification, 60–62 vote buying, 68, 71 Wawasan (Vision) 2020, 52–53, 55 Manchester school of anthropology, 9, 11, 12

246

INDEX

“Mangle of practice,” 176, 177, 186, 189 Manser, Bruno, 220 Maradi Engagement for the Fight Against Desertification, 33 Means-ends rationality, 3 Methodological deconstructionism, 15–16 Methodological populism, 3, 4, 128 Mexico, role of brokerage between community and state in, 11–12 Millennium Development Goals, 8 Mini-project approach, 111, 113, 114 Mission, study of, 21 Modernist paradigm, 144 Money politics, 57, 63, 71 Monti Rural Association (MRA) communities involved in, 151–152 Development Support Program, 158 delivery experiences Gallawater A, 157–159, 163, 168 Gasela farm project, 160–167, 168 Kwelera, 157, 168 Thornhill community, 152–154, 168, 169 early delivery experiments, 155– 157 as embodiment of embedded tale, 150 ethnographic fieldwork regarding, 159–167 Gasela Proposal to the Department of Land Affairs, 160 history and purpose of, 151 Proposal 1994–1997, 158 strategic translations, opportunities for, 19, 165, 167 struggles with development and delivery, 154–157

Morale, 140 Mosse, David, xv, 1, 144, 231 National Democratic Unity Party (Indonesia), 7 National planning, civic engagement and citizen consultation for, 5 Natural resources management of, 79, 88–89 overexploitation of, 53 Nauta, Wiebe, xv, 19, 149, 232 Negotiation, 10 “Neo-colonial tradition of political control through philanthropy,” 146 Neoliberal development paradigm, 2, 8–9, 104 Nepal, NGOs in, 20, 195–216 aphno manche, 195, 201–202, 209–210, 213, 214 focus and organization of NGOs studied, 199–201 gender awareness training in Besgaum, 197–199 history and evolution of, 195–196 jat, 201, 209, 210, 214 non-formal education (NFE) classes offered by, 200 professionalism, drive toward, 200–201 staff, 19–20, 199–200. See also Development workers New Economic Plan (NEP), Malaysia, 56–57 NGOs anti-developmental attitudes, fostering of, 201–204 assessment of research undertaken by, need for, 167 as learning organizations, 155 MRA as example of ethnographic research in, 149–172 in Nepal, 195–216

INDEX

power, 195, 214 role of, following 1992 Earth Summit, 104 strategic translation, opportunities for, 19, 165, 167, 232 in Vietnam, special significance of, 102 workshop bias, 159 Niger, aid policies and recipient strategies in, 17, 27–48 desertification as policy model, 30–34 local perceptions of development, gender differences in, 41–45, 46–47 peasant mentality, 37–38, 46 project agents, 34–36 sensitization, 28, 34, 37–41 underdevelopment, 35–37 “Noble savage” objectification, 20, 224 Nonviolent direct action (NVDA) approach to environmental activism, 220 Northeast Brazil Integrated Development Program (POLONOROESTE), 227 Offer-driven process, 45 Official Development Assistance (ODA), 123 OneWorld, 123 On-farm research (OFR), 189 Operational Plan for the Integrated Rural Development Project of Keita (GICO), 30–31 Order, creating through political acts of composition, 14 Orientalism, 217 Oxfam, 106 Pardesh, 214 Parry, Jonathan, 142

247

Participation, 8, 94, 231 Participatory approach to development, 3, 6, 104,106, 111, 113, 120, 199 Participatory poverty assessments, 106 Participatory rural appraisal (PRA), 3 Partnership, 6–7, 8 Partnership for Governance Reform (Indonesia), 6, 7 Paternalism, 144 Peasant sensitization, 28, 34, 37–41 Pedersen, Katrine, 118 Penan as co-producers of environmentalism, 221–224 from land rights to sustainability, 225–227, 232 opposition of to logging, 219–221 Penan Biosphere Reserve, 225 Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rainforest, 223–224 People-to-people diplomacy, 106 Perfect giving, 142 Performative idiom, 176 PFR. See Rural Land Plan (Plan Foncier Rural) PGRN (natural resource management project), 79–80, 85 Pickering, Andrew, 176, 186, 189, 231 Political mobilization research, 112 Politicization, 214 Popper, Karl, 177 Populist approach to development, 3–4, 149, 150 Poverty, 101–102 alleviation/reduction of, 8, 67 as a continuing problem in Vietnam, 120, 123 fair trade and extirpation of in Costa Rica, 128

248

INDEX

Power and partnership, 6–7 political rationality underpinning, 6 Power NGOs, 195, 214 Practical knowledge, 180 Preconditioning process to achieve modernization, 65 Primary Health Care/CommunityBased Rehabilitation (PHC/ CBR), 108 Primitive chaos, 69 Private property, right to, 133, 134 Privatization, Vietnamese-style, 121 Pro-poor growth, 106 Provincial Friendship and Development Association (Vietnam), 110 Purdah, 215 Purification, 213 QUANGO (quasi-NGO), 103 Quarles van Ufford, P., 149–150 Recipient strategies, 4 Representational idiom, 176 Repression, 6 Research centers, 118, 119 Research collective, 76 Rondônia Natural Resources Management Project (PLANAFLORO), 228–229 Rose, Nikolas, 92 Rosendo, Sergio, xv, 20, 217 Rossi, Benedetta, xv, 6, 17, 27, 114, 231 Rubber tappers of Amazonia, as international environmental cause célèbre, 227–229 Rural development and desertification, notions of, 30–34 hidden meanings behind, 58–59 Rural Land Plan (Plan Foncier Rural PFR), Benin, 17–18

briefly described, 75, 91 as a chain of translations, 84–85, 87 complexity issues and effectiveness of, 87–90 contracts and land transactions registration, 83–84 diagnostic reports, 82 effectiveness of, conclusions regarding, 91–92 goal of, 80–81 history of, 78–80, 93 inquiry statements, 82–83 interpretations, evolutions, and adjustments, 81–84 land tenure, knowing and ordering, 76–78, 91 objectives of, 75, 79 participatory ideology of, 91, 94 scope of, 80 structure of, 80 system of registration, 81 village land committees, 83 villages covered by, 86 Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM), 222 Salemink, Oscar, xv, 18, 101, 231 Sand-clock model of communication, 111 Santa Claus effect, 113 Sarawak state (Malaysia), logging in, 219–227 Sardan, Olivier de, 3–4, 10, 11, 47, 143 Save the Children Fund, 106 Scientific analysis, 150 Scientific knowledge, 4, 177 growth of, 177 performative dimension of, 19 representation of, 19 sociology of (SSK), 175 technocratic transfer of, 173, 174 Sebe, Lennox, 153 Secondary stakeholder participation, 5 Selective inclusion of information, 7

INDEX

Self-reliance, 56, 69 Self-sufficiency, 10, 32 Sensitization, 27–30, 37–41 defined, 27–28, 38–39 Separate lifeworlds, notion of, 28–29 Sidel, Mark, 118, 119 Sloganeering, 65 Social capital, 3 Social consensus, 90 Social discouragement, 32–33 Socialization, Vietnamese-style, 121 Social processes of policy, 3 Social relations, gift as means to create, 142 Social variables, 3 Sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), 175 Solidarity, 102, 132, 138, 141 South Africa, 19 apartheid, 151, 152, 153, 156 black spot communities, 155, 170 freedom and consultation era, 156, 157 Gasela farm, study of, 160–167 Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) program, 156 Land Redistribution/Restitution Program, 160 Land Reform Program, 170 new realism era, 156 NGO operation in, 151–169. See also Monti Rural Association (MRA) Rainbow Coalition, disintegration of, 156 Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), 156, 158 struggle era, 156 Surplus People Project (SPP), 151, 152, 169 Strategic stances, 10 Strategic translations, 19, 165, 167, 232

249

“Stretching of organizations,” 2 Structural amnesia, 85 Surplus People Project (SPP), 151, 152, 169 Sustainability, 122, 225–227 Sustainable development, notion of, 218 Sustainable livelihoods framework, 22 Suzuki, Chizuko, 118 Suzuki, D., 221 System goals, 16–17 Technologies of domination, 6 Technologies of self, 6 Third World, 4, 217 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 103 Top-down approaches to development, 84, 106, 114, 116, 218 Top-down technology transfer, 3 “Total prestations,” 142 Trade relations, conventional, 144. See also Fair trade Traditional farmers, 164 Translation, 13–17, 213 defined, 13 Latour’s notion of, 2, 15, 18, 20, 76, 175 Rural Land Plan in Benin as, 84–87 process, four steps in, 76 Tropical deforestation, international concern over, 227–228 Trust, 180 Unconscious dispositions, 10 Underdevelopment characterization of in Niger, 35–36 inducing aspirations to create, 36–37 United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNCOD), 31

250

INDEX

United Nations (continued) Conference on the Human Environment, 31 Development Programme (UNDP), 6, 37, 105, 120 Environment Program (UNEP), 31 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 30 Special Sahel Office (UNSO), 31 World Food Program (WFP), 31 Upward accountability, 18 Vargas, Carlos, 134, 140 Vietbsky, Piers, 177 Vietnam action research strategy, 109, 111, 112, 113 civil society case study of, 18, 101–126 definition of, 105 politics of in, 117–121 communication difficulties with, 111 as a country in transition, 105 developmental concepts, translating, interpreting, and contesting in, 112–117 foreign experts, dependence on, 115 grassroots democracy, 121 growth of, 105–106 INGOs, special significance of involvement in, 102, 103–107 integrated development project in, described, 107–112 local development groups, emergence of, 116 market economic reforms, adoption of, 101, 105, 108, 116 NGO-like organization, proliferation of, 118–119 open-door policy in, 101, 105

People’s Aid Coordinating Committee (PACCOM), 106 poverty in , 101–102, 105, 120, 123 Primary Health Care/ Community-Based Rehabilitation (PHC/CBR) program, 108 Provincial Friendship and Development Association, 110 return to normalcy, 101 socialization in, 121 subsidies, abolition of, 116 war, ongoing shadow of, 102 Women in Development (WID) program, 108, 115 Vietnam Fatherland Front, 105, 107, 118 Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), 106, 116 Vietnam Women’s Union, 107, 108, 115, 118, 120–121 Village beautification, 60–62 Water, scarcity of, 40 Wawasan 2020 (Malaysia), 52–53, 55 Wolf, Eric, 11 Women as agricultural extension agents, 184–185 development workers, 202, 209 gender awareness training in Besgaun, Nepal, 197–199 limitations on mobility of, 215 Women in Development (WID) program, Vietnam, 108, 115 Women’s League, African National Congress, 162 World Bank, 3, 6, 37, 79, 101, 104, 105, 106, 120, 226, 227, 229 Country Report on Lesotho, 231 Vietnam Living Standards Survey, 123

INDEX

World Food Program (WFP), United Nations, 31 World ordering knowledge, 4 World-ordering narratives, 21 Worlds of knowledge, 27, 28, 47

251

Zinder Seminar on Rural Development Intervention Strategies, 33 Zweledinga Residents Association (ZRA), 158