Repopulating Development: An Agent-Based Approach to Studying Development Interventions

Beck, Erin

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.11.019

Cited by 29 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Recognizing development as a complex social practice (Olivier de Sardan, 2005), I draw on Beck's (2016Beck's ( , 2017 recent work on microcredit in Guatemala, which theorizes development projects as "emergent interactions" among multiple parties with conflicting and interlocking dispositions, interests, and meanings (2017, p. 4). Beck (2016) argues that both critical scholarship and development practitioners overemphasize the outcomes of development projects at the expense of understanding the social relations between actors that constitute and are constituted by what we call "development." Understanding development as a "set of ongoing, contingent relationships" (Beck, 2017, p. 25) draws attention to what people are doing and what they are responding to, eschewing the idea of development as a one-sided static intervention that is done by the Global North to the Global South.…”

Section: Situating Aid-related Refusalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By drawing on refusal theory, I offer a theoretical pathway that lies beyond problematizing the presupposed hierarchies in aid provision thought to be necessary for successful “development” by attempting to meet the so‐called beneficiaries of aid on their own terms. Recognizing development as a complex social practice (Olivier de Sardan, 2005), I draw on Beck's (2016, 2017) recent work on microcredit in Guatemala, which theorizes development projects as “emergent interactions” among multiple parties with conflicting and interlocking dispositions, interests, and meanings (2017, p. 4). Beck (2016) argues that both critical scholarship and development practitioners overemphasize the outcomes of development projects at the expense of understanding the social relations between actors that constitute and are constituted by what we call “development.” Understanding development as a “set of ongoing, contingent relationships” (Beck, 2017, p. 25) draws attention to what people are doing and what they are responding to, eschewing the idea of development as a one‐sided static intervention that is done by the Global North to the Global South.…”

Section: Situating Aid‐related Refusalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Refusing aid

O'Sullivan

2023

American Ethnologist

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“Aid dependency” has long been a concern among development organizations, because it supposedly discourages the entrepreneurial spirit and thus hinders economic development. But what happens when beneficiaries refuse aid? In this article, I offer an ethnographic account of aid refusal in postconflict northern Uganda. There, members of savings and loan associations negotiate debts and investments through Acholi ethics of ripe, or “making life experiences together.” In doing so, they demonstrate that their refusals are not disavowals of development. Rather, they are refusals of development hierarchies and of the financialization of development, both of which risk obstructing Acholi ethics of interdependence. By analyzing ripe and the ways that association members negotiate the ethics of receiving aid, this article offers a counterpoint to dominant, pathologizing discourses of African dependency, corruption, and development—discourses predicated on Western, neoliberal valuations of work and community. In short, this article calls into question the assumption that economic growth is always the sine qua non of development.

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Section: Situating Aid-related Refusalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Situating Aid‐related Refusalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refusing aid

O'Sullivan

2023

American Ethnologist

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“…In contrast, Lau et al (2020) and Wilshusen (2019) observe how 'education' and 'training' can help enrol users alongside technologies as co-producers of dominant frameworks in rural development, such as ecosystem services and natural capital accounting (Lau et al 2020;Wilshusen 2019). Thus, technologies are deployed and users' agency is trained for attempted control to co-produce dominant frameworks (Beck 2016;Birkenholtz 2009).…”

Section: Assembling Agency Beyond Social Exclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

People’s Relational Agency in Confronting Exclusion in Rural South India

Arora¹,

Menon²,

Vijayabaskar³

et al. 2021

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Social exclusion is considered critical for understanding poverty, livelihoods, inequality and political participation in rural India. Studies show how exclusion is produced through relations of power associated with gender, caste, religion and ethnicity. Studies also document how people confront their exclusion. We use insights from these studies – alongside science and technology studies – and rely on life history narratives of ‘excluded’ people from rural Tamil Nadu, to develop a new approach to agency as constituted by two contrasting ways of relating: control and care. These ways of relating are at once social and material. They entangle humans with each other and with material worlds of nature and technology, while being mediated by structures such as social norms and cultural values. Relations of control play a central role in constituting exclusionary forms of agency. In contrast, relations of care are central to the agency of resistance against exclusion and of livelihood-building by the ‘excluded’. Relations can be transformed through agency in uncertain ways that are highly sensitive to trans-local contexts. We offer examples of policy-relevant questions that our approach can help to address for apprehending social exclusion in rural India and elsewhere.

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“…This work emphasises that organisations’ outcomes are reflective of social struggles among individual stakeholders operating within them (Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010; Long and van der Ploeg, 1989; see also van Voorst, 2019 for an overview). Such actor-oriented approaches provide critical windows to conceptualise everyday work practices as producing – and reproducing – various, and often contradictory, project outcomes for organisations, as well as competing conceptualisations of ‘aid effectiveness’ (Beck, 2016; Krause, 2014; Mueller-Hirth, 2012; Watkins et al, 2012). This alerts us to the urgency in which we need to consider intra-organisational dynamics in the aid sector and beyond, because ‘failing to link macro-organisational changes to micro-organisational processes, therefore, risks not only overlooking the proximal reasons for variation; it risks promoting an overly homogenous and undifferentiated image of socioeconomic development’ (Barley and Kunda, 2001: 78–79).…”

Section: Producing the Aid Project As A Case Of Labour Relations: A Review Of The Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Capitalising on ‘local knowledge’: The labour practices behind successful aid projects – the case of Jordan

Ward

2020

Current Sociology

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Humanitarian aid stakeholders increasingly call for localisation: to ensure aid projects utilise, and are informed by, local actors and their ‘local knowledge’. This article explores what this means in practice. Drawing upon the case of Jordan, a major global aid hub, the author shows how national aid workers’ local knowledge is critical for their employers’ projects in at least two ways: they work as ‘vulnerability finders’ to reach communities in need; and as ‘narrative negotiators’ to ensure projects’ designs and evaluations are based on local expertise. However, it was found that workers tailor the ways in which they mobilise their ‘local knowledge’ given their positions and interactions within their workplaces. To make sense of these calculated articulations, the author draws upon Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to argue that localisation is commodifying and transforming the power workers derive from their local status: from something that relates to their networks and knowledge within the local context to their ability to produce desirable project results. How workers labour in response highlights how localisation and the sector’s prevalent audit culture intertwine, and reproduce inequalities through particular constructions of local workers and their value to aid projects.

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Repopulating Development: An Agent-Based Approach to Studying Development Interventions

Cited by 29 publications

References 62 publications

Refusing aid

Refusing aid

People’s Relational Agency in Confronting Exclusion in Rural South India

Capitalising on ‘local knowledge’: The labour practices behind successful aid projects – the case of Jordan

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