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Accepted Paper:

The spaces between hope and despair  
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.

Panel P13
Engaged anthropology as the intersection between theory and practice
  Session 1