The company is here to do goodness to us: Imaginaries of development, whiteness, and patronage in Sierra Leone's agribusiness investment deals

Abstract

In this paper, we consider how references to ‘development’ are deployed to convince communities to lease their land to agribusiness investors in Sierra Leone. We argue that promises of development made by companies resonate with the aspirations for development that communities already have. The already existing ‘imaginaries’ of development, actual conditions of economic hardship and the material relations of power bound up in who does the ‘asking’ for land mean that communities need little convincing to give their land. Imaginaries of development are effective not only because of the promises of development themselves, but also because of how these imaginaries function through the role of coloniality – and ‘whiteness’ in particular. Analyses that focus only on the coercive power of elites in making land deals miss the degree to which companies’ promises of development fit into already existing imaginaries of a more prosperous future.

Understanding Regional Budget Reality in the Framework of Ethno-Semiotics

“…The community aspiration fund is a sum of funds proposed and allocated in the APBD as an implementation of the task of the Budget Agency, which is to provide advice and opinions in the form of basic ideas (pokir) of the DPRD to the regional head in preparing the regional revenue and expenditure budget design no later than 5 (five) months before the APBD is determined as stipulated in Article 55, Government Regulation Number 16 of 2010, regarding Guidelines for the Preparation of Regional Representative Council Regulations which regulates the Rules of Procedure of the Regional Representative Council [5]. The discourse on the "community aspiration fund" has become one of the realities of regional budgeting that has caused contradictions, so the question is whether the sign of the "community aspiration fund" that shows the reality ("content, C") that a sum of funds used in realizing programs or activities in the regional government represents ("expression, E") the actual needs and aspirations of the community, or is there another meaning related to the interests of certain individuals and groups [6].…”