Claire Mercer

NGOs, civil society and democratization: a critical review of the literature:

One of the most striking features of the anglophone literature on NGOs is the diversity of NGO sectors and their contributions to civil society and democracy; yet, exploration of this complexity is often eschewed in favour of a normative approach in which the apparently mutually enhancing relationship between NGOs, civil society and the state is underpinned by liberal democratic assumption rather than an engagement with wider debates about the politics of development. Following a critique of this approach to NGOs, civil society and democracy, the paper argues that the role of NGOs in the politics of development is far more complex than much of the NGO literature would suggest, and calls for a more contextualized and less value-laden approach to the understanding of the political role of NGOs.

Performing partnership: civil society and the illusions of good governance in Tanzania

Abstract The predicament of heavily indebted states is often marginalised in discussions of globalisation. This paper examines the experience of one heavily indebted African state, Tanzania, with recent IMF, World Bank and international donor initiatives to foster ‘good governance’ and ‘partnership’ in African countries within an overall framework of debt relief and continued adjustment. The paper focuses on the experience of civil society’s engagement with the emerging structures of governance, highlighting the contradictions of ‘partnership’ and the poverty of participation. The paper concludes that civil society’s involvement in governance structures in Tanzania engages it in a performance of partnership in the interests of ‘good governance’ which serves to legitimise continued adjustment.

Towards a critical political geography of African development

Abstract In this paper we aim to rethink the political geography of African development at the beginning of the 21st century. Central to our thesis are two intertwining legacies, paralleling Edward Said’s Orientalism. The first is the construction of Africa in the western imagination and the second is an enduring trusteeship towards the continent. The core movement we seek to critique and move beyond is the complicity between racialised knowledges about Africa and a series of political interventions that seek to ‘help’ Africans to develop. The paper begins by examining the legacy of colonialism in the policies towards and representations of Africa. Although selective and schematic we argue that what unites these power–knowledge constructions is a sense of trusteeship towards the continent. The next step is to look at ways of decolonising our knowledges as a means to effect more appropriate political engagement with Africa. For this we touch on a range of theoretical positions, but look most closely at the corpus of post-colonial theory for ways of doing this. While not uncritical of post-colonialism we find it potentially useful for destabilising western authority and in addressing questions of popular agency and cultural constructions of exclusion. From here we attempt a reformulation which addresses the role of the state, the politics of place and space, and the ways in which ‘we’––professional geographers––might go about our work.

The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women's Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people’s actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village-based women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this article deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women’s participation in their local organizations is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which women can demonstrate by participating in women’s groups. The over-representation of better-off and higher-status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest women, participation in women’s groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing inequalities within Chagga society.

Why do people do stuff? Reconceptualizing remittance behaviour in diaspora-development research and policy

Attempts by policy-makers to encourage diasporas to engage in development in the Global South rely on conceptions of behaviour drawn from economics that emphasize individual choice, stimuli and motivations. This article argues that diasporas are better understood as ‘communities of practice’ in which actions are conceptualized as part of a wider social system based on embodied knowledge acquired through socialization, technology and the habituation of particular lifestyles. Using social theories of practice to analyze remittances draws attention to the symptomatic silences of dominant theorizations of behaviour. Existing theorizations underpin, and thereby uncritically endorse, potentially unsustainable development policies based on remittances. The alternative approach presented here opens up new areas for policy and research based on medium to long-term changes in the socio-technical remittance regime.

Empowering People? World Vision & ‘Transformatory Development’ in Tanzania

Ideas of participatory development and empowerment have become central to contemporary development discourse. This article identifies two axes of tension within this discourse. First is the disturbing thought that by empowering a ‘community’ a development project can disempower groups or individuals within that community. Second is the paradox whereby external agents are perceived as necessary to install internal desires and capacities for individual and community autonomy. The article presents empirical data from research into two projects by the NGO World Vision in northeast Tanzania. The aim is to show that the dilemmas of development in practice turn around these axis of tension, as the attempts to empower the ‘community’ benefit disproportionately an elite – the idea of development as ‘empowerment’ inserted into the community from the outside.

Middle class construction: domestic architecture, aesthetics and anxieties in Tanzania

This paper examines the new styles of houses under construction in contemporary Tanzania and suggests that they can be understood as the material manifestation of middle class growth. Through an examination of the architecture, interior decor and compound space in a sample of these new houses in urban Dar es Salaam and rural Kilimanjaro, the paper identifies four domestic aesthetics: the respectable house, the locally aspirant house, the globally aspirant house and the minimalist house, each of which map on to ideas about ujamaa, liberalisation and the consumption of global consumer goods in distinct ways. The paper argues that these different domestic aesthetics demonstrate intra-class differences, and in particular the emergence of a new middle class.

African home associations in Britain: Between political belonging and moral conviviality

This paper argues that significant analytical and political possibilities for thinking about the African diaspora in Britain are opened up by shifting the analytical lens from ethnicity to place. Drawing on recent research with Cameroonian and Tanzanian home associations in Britain we suggest that the concept of a ‘progressive politics of place’, which distinguishes between ‘political belonging’ and ‘moral conviviality’, can help us to explore the morality of convivial relations in the African diaspora. We highlight the ways in which home associations provide space for debate about what is an intrinsically good way to live together in the diaspora. However, if moral conviviality is about debating the right and wrong ways of living together in a place, then we need to think explicitly about the places inhabited by the diaspora. The paper addresses the ways in which home associations provide a space not only for debate among members, but also a forum for debating how to live in Britain.

Saving, Spending, and Future-Making: Time, Discipline, and Money in Development

Money is a distributed technology for the government of futures. Using ethnographically informed accounts of social practices around saving and collective remittances in poor countries this paper examines how the malleability of money enables it to have the potential for formalisation which allows it to be brought into formal relations of future-making and foreclosure, at the same time as its potential for investments and reallocation enables it to be the basis of flexible and adaptive strategies of future-making. We show how individuals engaged in development aspirations strive to achieve futures through the collection, care, and use of money, and how strategies of formalisation, discipline, and framing accord money developmental capacities. The liquidity of money renders it a flexible vehicle for personal and collective aspirations while representing risk of leakage to other persons and ventures. The paper examines the strategies used by low-income savers and hometown associations in their concerns with establishing rules and discipline around the flexibility of money.

The revolution in permanence

As we go to press it has become clear that the Egyptian revolution of 25 January 2011 may not have gone according to plan – if indeed there ever was a coherent plan. Commentators from across the political spectrum, both inside and outside Egypt, have noted that June’s presidential election may simply confirm a soft military coup rather than a major achievement in democratic liberalisation. Egypt’s military, with its powerful corporate hold over more than 40% of the economy, was not to be deleted so easily. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) seems to have pulled the strings behind the election, shaping an outcome where the Egyptian armed forces rule without electoral support, and where a rhetoric of democratic electoral politics masks the persistence of a ‘deep state’ of entrenched military economic interests and likely continued crony capitalism. But before jumping to the conclusion that the revolution has been halted – which might also be the case elsewhere in North Africa (where imperialist intervention in Libya has led to chaos, and intense discord and Salafist meddling begins to undermine the gains in Tunisia) – let us look briefly at just what has unfolded in Egypt and what outcomes may emerge. Put bluntly, is the cup of achievement for political liberalisation and democratic deepening half full or half empty?