Abstract
Development agencies tend to focus more strongly on the promised delivery of change in the future than they do on analysing the historical contexts and origins of development ideas and practices. The histories of development ideas and agencies, as well as those of the people who work within them, are therefore important topics for anthropological attention. This paper sets out arguments for an anthropological approach that contributes a renewed sense of history to development policy and practice. There are two dimensions to this approach. The first is a need to place more stronger emphasis on the historical and political factors that help construct contexts in which development interventions occur. The second is to adopt a longer frame of historical reference in relation to development ideas, concepts and practices themselves, so that prevailing tendencies that focus attention predominantly on the present and the future can be challenged and counterbalanced. In order to illustrate these arguments, the paper explores issues in the history of ideas about non-governmental actors in development, and in the life histories of some of the individuals involved. Such an approach can be added to several other renewed forms of anthropological engagement that are helping move the anthropology of development away from an earlier impasse of ‘theoretical’ versus ‘applied’ tensions. A key role for a renewed and relevant anthropological engagement with development is one that brings a historical perspective on rapidly shifting fads and fashions that serve to over-simplify or erase the past to construct a ‘perpetual present’.
Les agences de développement ont tendance à se concentrer sur le changement potentiel futur plutôt que d'analyser les contextes historiques et les origines des idées et des pratiques en matière de développement. L'historique des idées et des agences de développement, ainsi que celui des individus travaillant au sein de ces dernières, sont donc un objet important d'attention de la part des anthropologues. Cet article vise à établir les paramètres d'une approche anthropologique qui contribuerait à renouveler le sens de l'histoire des politiques et pratiques en matière de développement. Il y a deux dimensions à cette approche. La première correspond à un besoin de mieux mettre en valeur les facteurs historiques et politiques qui contribuent à l'émergence de contextes spécifiques donnant lieu à des interventions particulières. La deuxième consiste à adopter une vision historique plus longue par rapport aux idées, concepts, et pratique de développement, afin de contrer les tendances actuelles qui se concentrent principalement sur le présent et le futur. Afin d'illustrer ces arguments, cet article explore l'historique d'idées concernant les acteurs non gouvernementaux dans le développement, en se focalisant en particulier sur les histoires de vie d'individus spécifiques. Une telle approche fait partie d'une nouvelle panoplie d'outils conceptuels qui peuvent aider l'anthropologie du développement à transcender l'impasse entre le théorique et la pratique qui affecte actuellement la discipline. Ceci peut en particulier servir à promouvoir un sens de l'histoire qui rejette les effets de mode et les approches qui simplifient trop ou effacent le passé afin de présenter le développement à travers un ‘présent perpétuel’.
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Notes
Mosse (2005) is a recent and notable exception.
Anthropologists themselves have from time to time come under heavy criticism for their lack of a sufficiently historical approach. For example, during anthropology's period of post-modern critical reflection in the 1980s, Marcus and Fischer (1986) questioned the tendency of anthropologists to focus on an ahistorical or exotic ‘other’ and instead argued for work on the ideas and institutions of anthropologists' own contexts, emphasizing the need to study power and history locally and globally.
This is not to say that such historical perspectives were not available to the project or argued for by certain project staff, but that they were in practice given low priority.
Hood (1998) has pointed out that the 1990s practice of ‘hot desking’ that was common among private sector companies such as Xerox and presented as the latest in up-to-date management thinking were not so dissimilar to ideas that had been advocated by Jeremy Bentham to improve the performance of public officials two centuries earlier!
When I was a postgraduate development studies student in the early 1980s in the Unite Kingdom, neither NGOs nor civil society were ever mentioned during teaching or within the set readings.
Different sets of NGO-related histories are also recoverable from other parts of the world: in Latin America, the growth of ‘liberation theology’ in the 1960s, the political ideas of radical Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, from peasant movements seeking improved rights to land and against authoritarianism, from the influence of Christian missionaries, the reformist middle classes and Gandhian ideas in India (Lewis, 2007). These histories help reveal more of the ‘indigenous’ sources and forces that also helped promote the rise to prominence of NGOs in the South.
The current interest in ‘faith-based organisations’ in place of NGOs is a particularly good example of the fads and fashions of the development industry, as such organizations are a longstanding feature of most societies that were long ignored by development agencies.
This observation is based on earlier work as an adviser to the initiative between 2002 and 2005, and continuing informal contact during regular visits to Bangladesh in the subsequent period.
The research project was funded by the UK Economic Social Science Research Council as part of its Non-Governmental Public Action Programme (Grant RES-155-25-0064). Twenty detailed life history interviews were collected in each of three contrasting country contexts: the Philippines, where many NGO activists have crossed into successive post-Marcos democratic governments to work on agrarian reform, social welfare and other issues; Bangladesh, where there is little movement from civil society into government, but considerable movement in the other direction and extensive informal linkages among key individuals between NGOs and government; and the United Kingdom, where there has been an intensification of movement between the two sectors in the past decade since the 1997 New Labour government came to power as a result of both purposeful exchange in the form of secondments, and increased flexibility and mobility in the labour market.
For example, the rise of ‘audit culture’ has been analysed in neo-Foucauldian terms as part of a shift to neo-liberal forms of governance which depends in large part on the role of individual agency in which ‘individuals, as active agents, are co-opted into regimes of power’ (Shore and Wright, 2001, p. 760).
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Lewis, D. International development and the ‘perpetual present’: Anthropological approaches to the re-historicization of policy. Eur J Dev Res 21, 32–46 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2008.7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2008.7