Giles Mohan

Participatory development and empowerment: the dangers of localism

Recent discussions in development have moved away from holistic theorisation towards more localised, empirical and inductive approaches. In development practice there has been a parallel move towards local ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’, which has produced, albeit with very different agendas, a high level of agreement between actors and institutions of the ‘new’ Left and the ‘new’ Right. This paper examines the manifestations of this move in four key political arenas: decentralised service delivery, participatory development, social capital formation and local development, and collective actions for ‘radical democracy’. We argue that, by focusing so heavily on ‘the local’, the see manifestations tend to underplay both local inequalities and power relations as well as national and transnational economic and political forces. Following from this, we advocate a stronger emphasis on the politics of the local, ie on the political use of ‘the local’ by hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interests.

The disappointments of civil society: the politics of NGO intervention in northern Ghana

Abstract During the 1990s, civil society emerged as the prime political force in the policy agenda of the major lenders and development agencies. An active civil society, it was believed, would enable choice, scrutinise errant governments, and ultimately lead to regularised, plural democracy. This article subjects this policy discourse to theoretical and empirical scrutiny. Theoretically, civil society is treated as a space of freedom, separate from the state, and constituted by non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This ignores the reciprocal linkages between state and society, the constraining effects of market forces, and the underlying ideological agenda of the major lenders. As a result, some political scientists working on Africa dismiss civil society as a useful analytical category. However, I follow Mamdani’s call for examining ‘actually existing civil society’ through a case study of NGO intervention in northern Ghana. It shows that tensions exist between the northern NGO and its partners, that the local NGOs create their own fiefdoms of client villages, and some officers use the NGO for personal promotion. Additionally, the single-minded strengthening of civil society undermines efforts at decentralisation. The conclusion suggests that the ‘Third Way’ programmes serve a neo-liberal policy agenda which enhances factionalism and promotes highly circumscribed visions of development.

New African Choices? The Politics of Chinese Engagement

The role of China in Africa must be understood in the context of competing and intensified global energy politics, in which the US, India and China are among the key players vying for security of supply. Contrary to popular representation, Chinas role in Africa is much more than this however, opening up new choices for African development for the first time since the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s. As such it is important to start by disaggregating ‘China’ and ‘Africa’ since neither represents a coherent and uniform set of motivations and opportunities. This points to the need for, at minimum, a comparative case study approach which highlights the different agendas operating in different African states. It also requires taking a longue durée perspective since China-Africa relations are long standing and recent intervention builds on cold war solidarities, in polemic at least. It also forces us to consider Chinese involvement in Africa as ambivalent, but contextual. Here we look at the political dimensions of this engagement and set out a research agenda that focuses on class and racial dynamics, state restructuring, party politics, civil society responses and aid effectiveness.

Networks as transnational agents of development

The term network has become a hallmark of the development industry. In principle networks have the potential to provide a more flexible and non‐hierarchical means of exchange and interaction that is also more innovative, responsive and dynamic, while overcoming spatial separation and providing scale economies. Although the label ‘networks’ currently pervades discourses about the relationships between organisations in development, there has been surprisingly little research or theorisation of such networks. This article is a critical evaluation of the claims of developmental networks from a theoretical perspective. While networks are regarded as a counter‐hegemonic force, we argue that networks are not static entities but must be seen as an ongoing and emergent process. Moreover, theory overlooks power relationships within networks and is unable to conceptualise the relationship between power and values. These observations open up a research agenda that the authors are exploring empirically in forthcoming publications.

Living multiculture: understanding the new spatial and social relations of ethnicity and multiculture in England

Since 2001, as the social and spatial compositions of multiculture and migration have become more complicated and diverse, geography has moved back to the centre of policy, political, and academic arguments about cultural difference and ethnic diversity in England. This spatial turn is most obvious in preoccupations with notions of increasing ethnic segregation, but it is also apparent in discussions of the possibility of everyday multicultural exchanges in relationally understood places. Responding to the work of others on these questions and in these places, and informed by data from research exploring Ghanaian and Somali migrant settlement in Milton Keynes, we review some of the quantitative and qualitative evidence being drawn on in academic, policy, and political debates about contemporary multiculture. We problematise the dominance of the concept of segregation in these debates and examine the value of the concept of conviviality for understanding the ways in which multiculture is lived.

Embedded Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Obligation: The Ghanaian Diaspora and Development

The author analyses how identities and obligations operate within the spaces of transnational communities and how this affects development. Within spatially diffuse communities, identities are fluid and overlapping, as are the obligations to multiple others—be that kin, ethnic group, or nation—in different localities. The author is concerned with the institutions through which these identities are formed and obligations are fulfilled. These include families, clans, hometown associations, and religious organisations, which link people ‘abroad’ to people ‘at home’. The author understands these spaces as a form of public sphere involving a ‘deterritorialised’ citizenship, which has been termed ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. In this way, obligations are not legally defined but operate as part of the moral universe of those concerned. The case study is based upon recent fieldwork on Ghanaians in the United Kingdom and their connections to other Ghanaians outside Ghana and to those at home. The ways in which these complex networks of affiliation operate, as well as the ways in which the state seeks to ‘capture’ support from them, and how migrants selectively redefine both ethnic identities and family boundaries, are described.

Globalisation From Below: Conceptualising the Role of the African Diasporas in Africa's Development

In the past both African Studies and Development Studies have ignored questions of the African Diaspora. This point was made by Zack‐Williams back in 1995 but since then there has not been much work attempting to rectify this matter. In this article we put forward a framework for examining the role of diaspora in development. This centres on recognising that the formation of the African Diaspora has been intimately linked to the evolution of a globalised and racialised capitalism. While the linkages between capitalism, imperialism and displacement are dynamic we should avoid a simplistic determinism that sees the movements of African people as some inevitable response to the mechanisms of broader structures. The complexity of displacement is such that human agency plays an essential role and avoids the unhelpful conclusion of seeing Africans as victims. It is this interplay of structural forces and human agency that gives diasporas their shifting, convoluted and overlapping geometry. Having established that we examine the implications of a diasporic perspective for understanding the development potential of both Africans in diaspora and those who remain on the continent. We argue that both politically and economically the diaspora has an important part to play in contemporary social processes operating at an increasingly global scale. The key issues we address are embedded social networks in the diaspora, remittances and return, development organisations, religious networks, cultural dynamics, and political institutions. We conclude by suggesting where diasporic concerns will take us in the next few years.

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.

Towards a Critical Geopolitics of China's Engagement with African Development

China, in its quest for a closer strategic partnership with Africa, has increasingly dynamic economic, political and diplomatic activities on the continent. Chinese leaders and strategists believe that Chinas historical experience and vision of economic development resonates powerfully with African counterparts and that the long-standing history of friendly political linkages and development co-operation offers a durable foundation for future partnership. Both in China and amongst some Western commentators a form of exceptionalism and generalisation regarding both China and Africa has been emerging. In this article instead we seek to develop theoretical tools for examining China as a geopolitical and geoeconomic actor that is both different and similar to other industrial powers intervening in Africa. This is premised on a political economy approach that ties together material interests with a deconstruction of the discursive or ‘extra-economic’ ways by which Chinese capitalism internationalises. From there we use this framework to analyse contemporary Chinese engagement in Africa. We examine the changing historical position of Africa within Beijings foreign policy strategy and Chinas vision of the evolving international political system, looking in particular at Chinas bilateral and state-centric approach to working with African ‘partners’. Chinese practice is uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the notion of ‘development’ as an independent policy field of the kind that emerged among Western nations in the course of the 1950s and increasingly China has come to be viewed as a ‘rogue creditor’ and a threat to the international aid industry. Rather than highlighting one strand of Chinese relations with African states (such as aid or governance) we propose here that it is necessary to critically reflect on the wider geopolitics of China-Africa relations (past and present) in order to understand how China is opening up new ‘choices’ and altering the playing field for African development for the first time since the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s.

Making neoliberal states of development: the Ghanaian diaspora and the politics of homelands

For impoverished African states the attraction of inward flows of capital is vital and migrants are one such source of finance. Some governments actively encourage this, which brings out tensions between national affiliation and more particularistic forms of identification. This paper examines this in the context of Ghana. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s there was largescale out-migration from Ghana, creating what has been termed a ‘neo-diaspora’. The migrants have mainly settled in cities in Western Europe and North America where they have developed institutional networks linking them to other diasporic locations and to Ghana. These migrants have complex identities forged from multiple meetings in numerous places. Some of these are rooted in hometown, clan, and family attachments and the obligations this brings. The current government (in line with many developing countries) is making a major play to ‘harness’ the diaspora for political support and inward investment. Tensions are being played out about dual citizenship and whether the migrants’ economic commitments to Ghana are matched by rights as full citizens. The Ghana government has to tread a careful path between attracting investment and garnering the right sort of political support, since people in the diaspora often have an ambivalent relationship to domestic politics. One of the vehicles through which the Ghanaian state seeks to square this is through encouraging hometown associations in various cities in the global North to fund development at the local level through various local–local partnerships. Hence, the nation, the national good, and development are being promoted through particularistic ethnic and locality-based organisations, which brings to light multiple and overlapping political communities.