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- Convenor:
-
Tamsin Bradley
(University of Portsmouth)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Anthropology Library
- Start time:
- 10 June, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel will consist of papers from anthropologists who are professionally engaged in international development including tourism and cultural heritage, sustainable livelihoods, human rights and community-led initiatives.
Long Abstract:
Increasingly anthropology is being recognised by NGOS and government bodies such as DFID as a valuable means of gathering local knowledge. There is now broad recognition within international development that detailed understanding of the local context is an important starting point for projects intended to impact at a local level. However the relationship between anthropology and the dominant economic models of development remains fraught. Anthropologists stress the need for longitudinal commitment to communities and considerable investment in understanding local dynamics and traditions. This gradual approach often conflicts with the results driven short-term view of NGOs and other actors. As such anthropologists working in development face challenges in trying to assert the practical value of their discipline.
The panel will consist of papers from anthropologists who are professionally engaged in international development including tourism and cultural heritage, sustainable livelihoods, human rights and community-led initiatives. We welcome papers from anthropologists actively engaged in areas of international development either as a researcher, practitioners or both.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Samantha Page
Paper short abstract:
Having been a practitioner working in the development field for more than 15 years I had become increasingly critical with the development field in which I was embroiled. Consequently I decided to step out of the development arena and conduct further research in order to critically challenge how knowledge about development is often inaccurately formed and then shapes unhelpful practice. I reached a point at which I felt ethically compromised continuing as a practitioner within a field I knew to be flawed. I am now conducting research reviewing and revisiting my experiences as a development practitioner in Malawi.
Paper long abstract:
My study is grounded in research into knowledge construction in epistemic communities. The specific focus is on the relationship between HIV and AIDS, cultural practices and human rights and the consequences for knowledge, policy and practice. The research setting is Malawi. Policies and prevention programmes on HIV and AIDS are being developed to modify or eradicate certain traditional cultural practices because they purportedly contribute to the spread of HIV. This paper argues that specific cultural practices do not contribute significantly to the spread of HIV and AIDS in Malawi. Instead a particular epistemic discourse has been shaped by INGOs, politicians and donors in order to explain the Aids crisis in Malawi. This discourse draws on the label 'harmful cultural practices' and the language of human rights, combined they distort the day to day realities of HIV transmission and treatment in Malawi.
Key questions this paper will explore include; How are epistemic communities reframing the AIDS epidemic to further their goals and self-interests? How are the debates within the epistemic community facilitated or constrained by international donors (bi and multilateral agencies)? To what extent is HIV and AIDS being represented as an exceptional circumstance, justifying policies that would not normally be applied to different public health crises? How are international frameworks, agendas and paradigms influencing and impacting on traditional cultural practices and human rights? What are the implications for HIV and AIDS policies and programmes?
Ram Babu Mallavarapu (Central University of Odisha, Koraput, India)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the issues relevant to development-induced-displacement, inadequacies in rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) policy and anthropological interventions for implementation of proper R&R measures for the project affected indigenous communities due to Kovvada reservoir in India.
Paper long abstract:
After independence, India's development policies and strategies have been focused mostly on the need for irrigation and other mining projects in order to achieve higher economic growth. In recent years, due to the process of urbanization, industrialization and globalization, the tribal territories, and their common property resources (CPRs) and other natural resources (NRs) have been exposed to the exploitative market forces such as the multi national companies (MNCs). As a result, acquisition of tribal lands by the State in tribal areas has been emerged as the common phenomenon, even without providing appropriate compensation. Consequently, the project affected persons (PAPs) have been resisting all through threats of displacement and demanding for the suitable R&R package with the awareness created by or knowledge gained from the engaged learning and action anthropological interventions. Keeping this in view, the paper discusses the issues of development, displacement and rehabilitation in India with a special focus on Kovvada reservoir project in West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh, the subject matter under study.
Dan Taylor (Find Your Feet)
Paper short abstract:
Participation in development projects remains at the rhetorical level with communities treated as both the targets and means of attaining development objectives. Shaped by a development discourse which purportedly represents the aspirations of communities, compliance within a dominant agenda makes coercion both unpalatable and unnecessary.
Paper long abstract:
Participation in development projects remains at the rhetorical level with communities treated as both the targets and means of attaining development objectives. Shaped by a development discourse which purportedly represents the aspirations of communities, compliance within a dominant agenda makes coercion both unpalatable and unnecessary. Yet development is diverted from its intended course due to the disconnected actions of its diverse agents comprising the agencies and communities involved in a development intervention. This is nonetheless circumscribed by the hegemonic agenda of powerful institutions, establishing the contours of putative consensual action, but with unintended consequences. One such consequence is the subversion by communities of this development agenda in a quest for immediate benefits. The hierarchy of agencies, including that of the communities themselves, and their competing representations of what development engenders foreclose the developmental space for a more transformational outcome.
Current attempts to qualify and quantify the results of development exemplify this trend, delinking means and ends in the process; this leads ineluctably to the transmogrification of development outcomes. The need to measure rather than bare witness to change, combined with an ever shortening project cycle, blurs the distinction between impact and indicator in attributing success.
Interwoven in this complex web of competing interests, is the assumption that development is linear, ahistorical and apolitical as agencies turn to technical instruments.
Using a case study approach, I will address these issues and suggest an alternative to current interventions which normalise compliance.
Emma Crewe (SOAS, London)
Paper short abstract:
Through an anthropological lens, and using examples from managing an international child rights NGO, I explore the coercion, compliance and contestation that can be found in the incongruities between the theory and practice of aid.
Paper long abstract:
Despair at the failure of aid sits alongside hope invested in the future. Through an anthropological lens, and using examples from managing an international child rights NGO in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the UK (2005-2011), I will explore the gap between optimistic imagining of the future, on the one hand, and the coercive and compliant practices of aid that we find when we look into the past.
Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps, I will suggest that people contest bureaucratic systems of rule but also collude with the status quo by forgiving past mistakes and joining in the rituals of imagining the future. I will explain three such rituals in some detail. First, a national NGO willingly tailoring its future plans to fit the criteria of a donor. Secondly, staff setting unrealistic objectives and targets in performance management processes that are at odds with a rhetoric of solidarity, team-working and innovation. Thirdly, the development of organisational visions, missions and strategies that require such ambition that only an aspiration to achieve the impossible seems to be acceptable.
I argue that in these examples we can observe the everyday operation of power. But it is also in the incongruities between theory and practice, and between past and future, that we continually create relationships and experience the emotion of engaging in the world of aid. Finally I comment on the possibilities for transforming these spaces.
Monica Mottin (Heidelberg University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the process of turning a ‘mission’ into a ‘development project’ and how this was resisted by both the donors and the religious implementing partners
Paper long abstract:
Between 2008 and 2011 I worked as a development advisor in a project/mission in a remote area of the East Tarai. A faith-based donor agency funded a project implemented by a Nepali family linked to a Catholic religious congregation and two Catholic religious communities. The Nepali Catholic Church did not 'recognize' the project. The project/mission was not grounded on standard forms of official project agreements and documentation but rather on periodical paternalistic 'evaluation' trips that that donors undertook without the employment of any 'development specialist'. Employed at the very last moment when the contradictions within the project where leading to its closure, the donor organization hoped that anthropological research could be useful in understanding the ground reality and finding ways to engage the local community and the Nepali Catholic Church into active participation.
The objective of this paper is to show how the analysis of the local context, revealing that the local community had been completely ignored by this top-down venture, was at first accepted by the donors when contesting the Nepali partner corruption. It was then rejected when I questioned the donors' and religious partners' organizational practices which were not allowing the local community to voice their concerns. Despite the high funding turnaround, the donor agency functioned through pseudo-religious rhetoric based on 'trust' and 'good will'. In contrast, the Nepali Catholic Church followed a legal a managerial framework - typical of mainstream development - to implement their social development work.
Jónína Einarsdóttir (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
Ban on begging is increasingly used as an anti-trafficking strategy in Europe. In response to threats from donors to cut aid if no action would be taken against Koran teachers who force children to beg, the Senegalese Government adopted ban on begging. This paper examines how the teachers responded to the ban and presents some unintended consequences.
Paper long abstract:
NGOs are frequently seen as protectors of groups who live under precarious conditions. Anthropologists have however highlighted that interests of NGOs and such groups do not always coincide, particularly when they are classified as victims of human trafficking. Anthropological reports of 'collateral damage' of anti-trafficking activities abound.
Many of the young boys who beg on the streets of Senegalese cities come from rural areas and neighboring countries, particularly Guinea-Bissau. Most are Koran school students classified as victims of child trafficking. International organizations and donors have spent considerable funds to finance NGOs that rescue the boys and repatriate them to dismay of their parents. In response to threats from donors to cut aid if no action would be taken against Koran teachers whose students beg, the Senegalese Government adopted ban on begging in August 2010. The ban had immediate effects, beggars disappeared from certain areas of Dakar and Koran teachers were detained and sentenced.
Study on consequences of the ban for the teachers and their students, particularly the Bissau-Guinean ones, was initiated. The effects of the ban varied depending on the origin of the teachers. In general, the Koran teachers strengthened their collaboration and mobilized popular support, which resulted in withdrawal of the ban. Conflict arose between NGOs and the teachers and local populations, whose children NGOs aim to rescue. The boys, whose situation the ban aimed to relieve, suffered hunger during its enforcement. Since the withdrawal they beg as usual, however with increased fear of being 'rescued' and repatriated.