The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745323863 ISBN 13: 9780745323862

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Today international development policy is converging around ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction. What does this mean for the local and international dimensions of aid relationships?

The Aid Effect demonstrates the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. The contributors provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official aid policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the working of power inequalities built through the standardisations of a neoliberal framework.

The contributors take on new challenges to anthropology presented by a 'global aid architecture' which no longer operates through discrete projects but has moved on to sector wide approaches, budgetary support and other macro-level instruments of development; but they remain faithful to the fieldwork methodology that is anthropology's strength and the source of rare insight.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

David Mosse is a Director of Studies in the Department of Anthropology at School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is the author of Cultivating Development (Pluto Press, 2004). David Lewis is Senior Lecturer in NGO Management at the London School of Economics. He is the co-author of Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge (Pluto Press, 1996).

Surya Monro has been involved in gender and sexuality activism for over 15 years. She is Senior Research Fellow in the Policy Research Institute at Leeds Metropolitan University. _x000B_She has published in various refereed journals, has taught in the field and has spoken at a range of national and international conferences.

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The Aid Effect

Giving and Governing in International Development

By David Mosse, David Lewis

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2005 David Mosse and David Lewis
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2386-2

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
1. Global Governance and the Ethnography of International Aid David Mosse, 1, 
2. Good Governance as Technology: Towards an Ethnography of the Bretton Woods Institutions Gerhard Anders, 37, 
3. Timing, Scale and Style: Capacity as Governmentality in Tanzania Jeremy Gould, 61, 
4. The Genealogy of the 'Good Governance' and 'Ownership' Agenda at the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation Jilles van Gastel and Monique Nuijten, 85, 
5. Whose Aid? The Case of the Bolivian Elections Project Rosalind Eyben with Rosario León, 106, 
6. Interconnected and Inter-infected: DOTS and the Stabilisation of the Tuberculosis Control Programme in Nepal Ian Harper, 126, 
7. The Worshippers of Rules? Defining Right and Wrong in Local Participatory Project Applications in South-Eastern Estonia Aet Annist, 150, 
8. Unstating 'the Public': An Ethnography of Reform in an Urban Water Utility in South India Karen Coelho, 171, 
9. Disjuncture and Marginality – Towards a New Approach to Development Practice Rob van den Berg and Philip Quarles van Ufford, 196, 
Notes on Contributors, 213, 
Index, 216, 

CHAPTER 1

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF INTERNATIONAL AID

David Mosse

Today international development policy is characterised by the convergence of ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction within a framework of 'global governance'. What insights into the social processes and effects of this new consensus on aid and global governance can anthropology give? This is a good moment to ask such a question. In recent years there has been a gradual expansion of the scope of ethnography from its classical concern with 'the local' and 'the other', or the impact of global processes on local places, to more sophisticated conceptions of local-global relations. Some of these examine the way in which global capitalism has to negotiate its presence in specific settings; some explore the 'production of locality' in the context of global processes (Appadurai 1997); and yet others focus on the production of globalisation in terms of the relationships and institutions through which 'the global' is articulated (Burawoy 2001).

The aid effect is a contribution to this ethnographic trajectory. Its chapters demonstrate the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. Together they provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the workings of power inequalities and biases built through the standardisations and efficiencies of a neoliberal framework. At the same time, a 'global aid architecture' presents new challenges to the anthropology of development. How are relationships (international, state-citizen) reconfigured in the contemporary transnational aid domain? Are boundaries between nation-states, donors and self-governing international financial institutions (such as the IMF and the World Bank) blurred by the new technical demands of managing aid flows? Does the 'moral resurrection of aid' with its emphasis on ownership, participation and good governance in fact conceal an era of greater intervention by international agencies in the internal affairs of developing countries?

The contributors here do not regard 'governance' in its global form as simply a matter of 'super-state' dominance and hegemony. Rather they turn research attention to understanding how legitimacy is won for international policies, how programmes enrol participants with the rhetoric of freedom, partnership, ownership or participation; how order or control is achieved through internalised disciplines of power (Rose and Miller 1992); how (as in the past) states govern through community control (Li 2002); and how the representational practices through which state power operates (e.g. spatial metaphors of vertical encompassment which put the state 'above', people 'below') are extended, but also disrupted, within the transnational sphere (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Since the work of 'governance' is dispersed to private sector service providers, enterprises, communities, NGOs (non-governmental organisations), donors (and a host of competing, rival or parasitic transnational lobbying and financing networks, 2002: 994), it is, as Tania Li noted, 'an empirical question whether these are coordinated by state bureaucracy', or located within the framework of the nation-state at all. Attention has then to be directed to transnational systems. Focusing on those of international aid, ethnographers in this volume ask what might be the instruments (technical, procedural, legal, statistical) of an aid regime of 'rule' through mutual complicity? What (or on whom) does the order of an internationalised policy regime impose, exclude, suppress or depoliticise? Alternatively, how does it liberate, include and make accountable? In answer, the chapters of the book trace the paper trails, the protocols and practices, the rules and routines, the idioms and identities through which people become subjects of, as well as subject to, global development. Drawing attention to these dispersed procedures and instruments of governance, often autonomous from the state and national politics, some authors draw on the notion of 'governmentality' (of a transnational kind, cf. Ferguson and Gupta 2002), although, as will be clear, overall the book challenges this Foucauldian concept as an explanation for the workings of the international aid system.

This introductory chapter begins with an explanation of the new framework of international aid, its commitments and modalities. I then set out the neoliberal and institutionalist underpinnings of this framework, and examine concerns raised in the recent literature about the implications of policy convergence. Third, I ask what approach has anthropology taken, or might it take, to researching global governance. In this context I reflect, fourth, on the significance and limitations of the Foucauldian notion of 'governmentality' for an ethnographic approach to global processes. Finally, I examine some alternative conceptualisations that allow simultaneously for the contingencies and specifics of power and the reproduction of universal policy frames.

THE NEW AID FRAMEWORK: GLOBALISATION, GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND AID

Much of this book focuses on what has sometimes been characterised as a 'new architecture of aid'. To what does this refer? First, it refers to the focus of aid on policy reform rather than conventional investment projects; reform which is 'neoliberal' in the sense of promoting economic liberalisation, privatisation and market mechanisms as the instruments of growth and efficiency. Instead of funding individual projects donors collaborate (in principle) to make concessional finance available (in the short term through budgetary support) to assist governments to develop their own overall strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction (through Comprehensive Development Frameworks, sector-wide approaches [SWAPs], and the like) or finance the cost of fiscal, governance or pro-poor reforms that would make these strategies sustainable in the long run...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745323863
• ISBN 13: 9780745323862
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Herausgeber: Mosse David
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland