Development beyond Politics: Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana (Non-Governmental Public Action)

Development beyond Politics 9780230_236424_01_prexvi.indd i 7/7/2011 6:08:39 PM Non-Governmental Public Action Seri...

Author: Thomas Yarrow

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Development beyond Politics

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Non-Governmental Public Action Series Editor: Jude Howell, Professor and Director of the Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Non-governmental public action (NGPA) by and for disadvantaged and marginalized people has become increasingly significant over the past two decades. This new book series is designed to make a fresh and original contribution to the understanding of NGPA. It presents the findings of innovative and policyrelevant research carried out by established and new scholars working in collaboration with researchers across the world. The series is international in scope and includes both theoretical and empirical work. The series marks a departure from previous studies in this area in at least two important respects. First, it goes beyond a singular focus on developmental NGOs or the voluntary sector to include a range of non-governmental public actors, such as advocacy networks, campaigns and coalitions, trades unions, peace groups, rights-based groups, cooperatives and social movements. Second, the series is innovative in stimulating a new approach to international comparative research that promotes comparison of the so-called developing world with the so-called developed world, thereby querying the conceptual utility and relevance of categories, such as North and South. Titles include: Barbara Bompani and Maria Frahm-Arp (eds) DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICS FROM BELOW Exploring Religious Spaces in the African State Jude Howell and Jeremy Lind COUNTER-TERRORISM, AID AND CIVIL SOCIETY Before and After the War on Terror Jenny Pearce (ed.) PARTICIPATION AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CITY Tim Pringle and Simon Clarke THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSITION Trade Unions in Russia, China and Vietnam Thomas Yarrow DEVELOPMENT BEYOND POLITICS Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana

Non-Governmental Public Action Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–22939–6 (hardback) 978–0–230–22940–2 (paperback) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd., Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Development beyond Politics Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana Thomas Yarrow School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University

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© Thomas Yarrow 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–23642–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yarrow, Thomas, 1977– Non-governmental public action : aid, activism and NGOs in Ghana / Thomas Yarrow. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–23642–4 (hardback) 1. Economic assistance—Ghana. 2. Ghana—Economic conditions. 3. Non-governmental organizations—Ghana. I. Title. HC1060.Y37 2011 338.9667—dc23

2011013821

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Text Boxes

vi

List of Acronyms

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Preface

x

A Note on Names

xvi

Introduction: Hope in Development

1

Part I Ideology 1 The Politics of Charity 2 Development in Person 3 Personal Relations, Public Debates

Part II

19 45 77

Practice

4 Local and Global 5 Indigenous and Western 6 Policy and Practice

105 126 146

Conclusion: What Is to Be Done? Postscript: Acting and Understanding

161 170

Notes

173

References

182

Index

193

v

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Text Boxes 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1

Emmanuel Lucas Simon Emily Florence Patience Kwaku Akua Joseph Albert Peter Charles Stephen Sulley Jacob Chris James

27 30 32 54 57 61 63 67 82 84 88 116 120 129 132 135 156

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Acronyms CBO CFA CHD DFID FGP IKDC IMF INCC JFM MOFA NDM NGO NUGS PADNET PNDC SRC WEFCU WENREMP YCM YCS

community-based organization Catholics for Action Centre for Human Development Department for International Development Forestry Governance Project Indigenous Knowledge Development Centre International Monetary Fund Interim National Coordinating Council June Fourth Movement Ministry of Farming and Agriculture New Democratic Movement non-governmental organization National Union of Ghana Students Participatory Development Network Provisional National Defence Council Student Representative Council Wenchi Farmers’ Credit Union Wenchi Natural Resource Management Project Young Catholic Movement Young Christian Students

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Acknowledgements It is an unfortunate artefact of scholarly convention that the contributions of the many people who made this book possible are not made fully explicit in the text itself. In the often frantically busy world of NGOs, time is a scarce commodity. I was therefore amazed at the amount of it that various people invested in my project. My debts in this regard are too numerous to fully acknowledge here, but I wish to thank in particular Tony Dogbe, Celia Marshall and the rest of the Dogbe family, who did more than I could possibly have wished to make me feel at home in their family, while providing intellectual provocation and encouragement. During my time in Accra, I stayed with Emily ‘Auntie’ Asiedu, in whose warmth and hospitality I found refuge from fieldwork. Only retrospectively have I come to see how much she contributed to my own understanding of it. Oteng Danso made me feel at home in Accra and got me out of a number of difficult situations with characteristic skill and diplomacy. Many of the ideas in this book developed through thinking comparatively. The book has developed over a period of time in which I have been lucky to benefit from the collective wisdom of colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, the Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham and the School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University. In all of these places the book was shaped in relation to intellectual currents whose sum is not reducible to their parts. Specific inspiration came through my relationships with three key people: From the outset Tony Crook saw more in my ideas than I saw myself. Without his encouragement it is unlikely that I would have continued with anthropology, let alone that this book would have been written. Before her untimely death, Sue Benson provided intellectual and personal inspiration. Though she never saw the final result, I hope she would have recognized something of herself in it. The book would certainly have taken a very different form without her. As adviser to the project from which this book developed, Marilyn Strathern placed productive limits on the theoretical paths I took. It is only retrospectively that I have truly appreciated how freeing these limits have been. viii

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Acknowledgements ix

As well as drawing attention to its limitations and omissions, comments on various draft stages of this book (and of pieces of text that have failed to make it that far) and discussion of the research on which it is based have helped me to see unanticipated possibilities in my own arguments. In particular, I wish to thank Karin Barber, Barbra Bodenhon, Matei Candea, Jo Cook, Harri Englund, Maia Green, John Gledhill, Paul Henley, Amin Kamete, Ann Kelly, James Leach, David Lewis, Annmarie Mol, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Michelle Obeid, Adam Reed, Annelise Riles, Mike Rowlands, Tony Simpson, David Sneath, Jack Taylor, Soumhya Venkatesan, Dick Werbner, Pnina Werbner, David Yarrow and Rachel Yarrow. In thinking through these arguments in the context of Ghana, conversations with Lynne Brydon, Jane Clifford, Jennifer Hasty, Tom McCaskie, Stephan Miescher, Bianca Murillo and Paul Nugent have been particularly helpful. I would like to thank Christina Brian, Jude Howell and Renee Takken at Palgrave Macmillan for editorial help, support, criticism and advice. This book is partly about the importance of personal relations and is also to a large extent an artefact of my own. In particular I wish to acknowledge the intellectual stimulation and support of Anwen Cooper, Duncan Garrow, Laura Jeffery, Sian Jones, Mark Knight, Rosie Knight, Lesley McFadyen, Tomas Millar and Beccy Scott. Judith, Tony, Hugh, Rachel and David Yarrow supported the endeavour, even where its point wasn’t always evident. Marble helped too! Above all, I wish to thank Chantal Conneller, who has borne the brunt of the anxieties and difficulties I have encountered through research and writing, and whose love and encouragement has helped see me through. Funding for the research came from the Economic and Social Research Council, the Smuts Fund and a Cambridge Domestic Research Studentship. Most of the book was written with the support of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

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Preface This is a book about development: the ideas, institutions and practices through which people have variously pursued visions of a better world. These institutions and ideas have often been understood as a coherent ‘global’ entity – a system of knowledge and power conforming to an overarching logic. By contrast this book seeks to draw out the different kinds of practice and relationship through which understandings of development are produced. Since these practices are multiple, I suggest that development cannot be understood as a singular ‘thing’. It follows that ‘it’ does not conform to a singular logic – whether of ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘globalization’ or ‘the West’. But neither is it adequate to show how ideas of development are ‘locally’ refracted. That would assume that ‘difference’ could only be located outside development; that development was not itself constituted in the multiplicity of practice. But it is not enough to think of development only as a multiplicity of perspectives. We also need to understand how development causes people and things to come together; in other words, how various resources, texts, people and technologies articulate so that the sum comes to seem more than the parts. From this perspective, development is more than one but less than many (Mol 2002, Strathern 1991). Why is this important? Conceptually and empirically, I hope to show that this provides a more convincing account of how development organizations actually operate. Although the book draws from a long and rich tradition of development anthropology, it departs from the main tenets of this canon in certain key respects. It steers away from a position of critical detachment in order to get back to a more classically ethnographic commitment to empirically informed philosophy. Rather than criticize development – as if it were a thing to be criticized – I aim to understand, analyse and reflect on the practices that constitute it. Why reflect when urgent problems need redressing? Why philosophize when the world is full of poverty and inequality that demands action? My response is to assert that theory itself is a form of action. We only have to choose between ‘understanding’ and ‘acting’ if we imagine a world that exists independently of how we know and make sense of it. If we give up on that opposition we understand that it is only by x

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seeing differently and more clearly that we come to realize the limitations and the possibilities latent in what is already happening; it is only by carefully describing how development takes shape that we arrive at an understanding of how it might take shape differently. At the same time, it is necessary to be clear that the kind of activity I have undertaken in researching and writing this book is very different to the kinds of activities undertaken by the subjects of my research. Development workers routinely reflect on and write about their own activities, but they do so with different intent. They want to find ‘answers’ to ‘problems’. This involves weighing different options and judging which ones work. These are valuable activities but not ones that I engage in. The book does not approach development as a ‘problem’ in need of an ‘answer’. Rather than outline what development workers should be doing, I want to expand the theoretical repertoire for thinking about what they already do. To this end, the book is an attempt to amplify our sense of the reality of development by taking account of all the people and things through which its reality is ascribed. It does this on the basis of descriptions that attempt to remain as faithful as possible to the people and activities they describe. The book is not the same as the things it describes, so something is lost in the process. But description and reflection are also acts that add something. I hope that ‘something’ is a clearer sense of the different interests, ideologies and stakes that development articulates, and a better sense of how it does this. As an argument with other academics, this makes a point that will be self-evident to many development practitioners: if development practices are multiple, then it is futile to imagine there might be one overarching development ‘solution’. Since this is a book about the specific practices and relationships through which development emerges, it is important to be specific about my emplacement within these. All the situations, events and people I describe relate to the activities of development organizations in Ghana. Most of these relate to the activities of non-governmental organizations. For narrative purposes, I situate the book within the ethnographic present of 2003, when I spent twelve months collecting the bulk of the material on which the account is based. In practice it is also based on research undertaken during various subsequent trips over the following five years. What I intended to look at was very often not what I found. Initially conceived as an experiment in ‘multi-sited’ ethnography (Fortun 2001, Marcus 1998), my intention had been to ‘follow’ the flow of people, texts

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Preface

and technologies between sites. In practice this was difficult to do. Sites do not exist independently from the connections and disconnections that people assert in relation to place: if you follow what people do, one site becomes many; many sites become one. Far from spatially distinct places, sites turned out to be artefacts of the very practices I was seeking to describe. As people moved between places, so places seemed to move between people. Rather than a world composed of distinct locales connected by the knowledge and discursive practices of development, it became clear that development was itself intrinsic to its connection and separation. What to do? I set out assuming that the elucidation of different contexts would illuminate the practice of development. I came to realize that the task was in fact to explain how development practice created different forms of context. I did this in relation to a range of people, events and activities. Partly I followed my interests; partly I got side-tracked by others’ interests. Sometimes the two coincided. Throughout my research I employed ethnographic techniques. I participated in the activities of different development organizations and I observed what I saw. Often this was difficult. Development organizations depend on the knowledge of ‘experts’. In general they are not so keen on naive interlopers. Consequently the kind of indeterminacy so valued by ethnographers was often difficult to maintain. People wanted to know who I was, why I was there and what I was doing. Valuing an ethnographic commitment to open-ended research, I often told them the truth: that I didn’t ‘know’. This made many people uneasy. Some suspected ulterior motives; many were confused, others were amused. Fortunately for me, some were also intrigued. One such person was Tobias, an immaculately presented German expat. A chance encounter led to an interview and the subsequent offer of an informal internship. He ran the Forest Governance Project, funded by one of the largest international development agencies. Staffed by a mixture of Europeans and Ghanaians, the project was based in the Forestry Commission headquarters, an old colonial building in the centre of Ghana’s capital, Accra. Intrigued by the prospect of having an anthropologist around, Tobias agreed to allow me to shadow him. In this capacity I accompanied him to meetings, workshops and seminars principally attended by donors and senior government officials. But frequently nothing much happened. So I read project documents at an ostentatiously large table in an uncomfortably cold air-conditioned room. I spoke to the bored, largely unoccupied drivers who lounged in the 4x4s under shady trees at the back. And when I could, I interviewed the staff.

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Part of the project’s remit was to ‘strengthen civil society’, through ‘building capacity’ of NGOs. In practice this involved a series of seminars and workshops in which various NGOs and other ‘stakeholders’ were brought together. As part of my commitment to understanding the multiplicity of development practice, I also took part in these. On one such trip I came to know of the Ghana Participatory Development Network (PADNET), a network of NGOs with their headquarters in Ghana’s second largest town, Kumasi. Fortunately for me they lacked funds and needed help. This created an opportunity to gain practical experience. So I moved to their offices, located on the first floor of a squat, shabby, concrete building amid the hustle and bustle of hawkers and vendors at a busy intersection in Kumasi. I participated in the putting together of a series of events to inaugurate and promote the organization, taking photos, taking notes and attempting to contribute what I could. Later I wrote reports on these as part of the organization’s commitment to its donors. I became involved in development practices and tried to watch myself doing these. As ever I watched others and took notes – on meetings, conversations, interviews and documents. Sometimes I took notes on my notes. During this period I lived with the network’s founder, a ‘pioneer’ of the NGO movement. He lived with his British wife and much of their extended family. The experience further unsettled many of my assumptions. People get involved with development for various reasons. As various scholars have pointed out, one of these is money, but I soon came to realize that personal and ideological motivation were not reducible to economic factors alone. Living with NGO workers, I came to see development as a way of life and saw the forms of commitment and sacrifice that it sometimes inspires. I saw how it imbricates itself in the very fabric of people’s day-to-day existence; how it orients experience and provides a language in which people make sense of their lives. In order to find out more I started talking to other NGO workers – asking them what they did and why they did it. Working in a network, I gained a lot of contacts. One of these was Yaa, the vivacious and charismatic project leader of the Wenchi Natural Resource Management Project (WENREMP), a ‘participatory’ project undertaken by a leading international NGO. Located in Wenchi district, this sought to alleviate bushfire incidence through the creation of ‘alternative livelihoods’. In practice this entailed meeting with representatives of the eight villages in which the project was undertaken and helping to ‘build capacity’. Through these practices development became a different thing again. To try to understand this difference I

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took part in meetings and accompanied project staff on their trips to villages. I talked to all concerned and watched what they did. When I could (which was not very often) I helped. A lot of this was very repetitive. But if you see the same thing every day, it starts to be a different thing. WENREMP were keen to promote the use of ‘indigenous knowledge’ in order to realize the project’s objectives. This led me to attend a series of workshops and seminars that constituted a final site of interest. Organized by the Indigenous Knowledge Development Centre (IKDC), these brought together various NGO and development workers with representatives of traditional authorities. The forms of these workshops were familiar but their enactment required specific work. And the effects were specific too. So here again development came to be about something that was partially connected (Strathern 1991) to the other practices I witnessed. Working with NGO workers, there was often little for me to do. I wanted to watch what people did. Sometimes this wasn’t much, so I also had to try to make things happen myself. As well as interviewing NGO workers about themselves, I also talked to them about the NGO sector. I tried to get a sense of how this works – and also how it doesn’t. All these activities and experiences relate to development organizations in Ghana, but this is not an account of Ghanaian development practice. The events I relate are both more and less specific than this: more general in that many of the processes, practices and relationships I describe are instances of broader processes, practices and relationships taking place in other parts of the world, but more specific in that the account is not (and does not pretend to be) a comprehensive overview of the Ghanaian development sector. Since the account seeks to understand the practices through which development projects are enacted, the people, events, organizations and discourses I discuss are necessarily specific. If I had spent more time doing research, I may have seen more things but would not have gained a more totalizing picture of those things. (I could have traced longer networks but this would not have taken me beyond the contingency of practice through which such networks are formed and negotiated.) Nonetheless, I hope the account speaks beyond the specific moments it describes. In highlighting the specificity of development practice, it makes a general point: development emerges through practices that fabricate both connection and difference; coherence is always ‘after the

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fact’ (Mol 2002), as are the forms of distinction and disconnection it produces. The title of the book refers to the ethnographic sense in which key development actors in Ghana describe their personal development from an overtly ‘political’ movement, to ‘non-political’ concern with development. The title also captures one of the book’s central arguments: much recent scholarship on development has been politically reductionist, imagining ‘politics’ as the ‘reality’ behind the ‘facade’ of ostensibly progressive ideologies and actions. By contrast, the book suggests that the analysis of development needs to move beyond this political framing, if it is to appreciate the ideological and ethical complexities that development work entails. The book is divided into two sections that broadly echo a distinction made by development professionals between ‘ideology’ and ‘practice’. The first three chapters compose the first section which is concerned with the personal ideologies and beliefs that motivate people to engage in development organizations. The latter three chapters compose the second section, focusing on the institutional knowledge practices through which development projects are enacted. Throughout the text, I include biographies of some of the main protagonists. Based on life history interviews, they are intended to convey a sense of these narratives: the forms they take and the terms in which they are imagined. While I do not present them as any more ‘real’ than other parts of the narrative (and explicitly recognize my own role in their construction), they form a deliberate counterpoint to the analytic themes I develop. Since their mode is descriptive, I hope they make evident that the different chapters are ultimately distinct analytic perspectives on ‘the same thing’.1

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A Note on Names It is part of the argument of this book that the effectiveness of development organizations to a large extent depends on tacit forms of relationship and knowledge that cannot be made publicly visible. This is not to suggest such organizations are ‘corrupt’, but rather that the enactment of an effective ‘public sphere’ itself depends on activities that necessarily remain private. Throughout the text I have protected the anonymity of individuals and institutions through the use of pseudonyms (unless explicitly stated otherwise). The people and institutions described are all, to the best of my knowledge, ‘real’.

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Introduction: Hope in Development

In Ghana, as in much of Africa, it is hard to escape the various activities, material manifestations and discursive spaces created by development organizations. Driving around the capital, Accra, brightly coloured hand-stencilled banners advertise workshops, meetings and development forums, while sign boards at the roadside link non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with various projects and programmes. Amid the congested streets, four-wheel drive vehicles emblazoned with NGO logos stand out from the battered taxis, trotros (local buses) and over-laden lorries, testament to the ubiquity of such organizations and the extent of the resources at their disposal. At rickety wooden roadside kiosks, newspaper headlines boldly proclaim the successes and failures of development projects, feeding off and into widespread public interest about the activities of NGOs and development organizations. Such discourses emerge through the practices of a relatively elite group of Ghanaian and Western development workers, but form part of a nationally understood lexicon through which a variety of interests are articulated.1 Although existing work helps reveal aspects of these developmental spaces, an underlying political and economic functionalism has precluded ethnographic understanding of the people and institutions that comprise this reality. In particular, theories of ‘development’ and of the post-colonial state have both tended to subordinate actors’ ideologies, beliefs and activities to their role in upholding existing hierarchies and inequalities. Critics of ‘development’ point to the elite appropriation of development resources and to the instrumental use of ostensibly progressive development discourses in perpetuating social and economic inequity. In a parallel move, post-colonial theorists have dismissed the ideological pronouncements of elite Africans as facades, intended to conceal social and economic inequity. 1

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By contrast, this book shows how development organizations constitute an integral part of post-colonial African reality. Through focusing on the activities of NGOs and development organizations, this account explores the social, cultural and institutional realities within which ideas of ‘development’ become meaningful and contested concepts. As such, the account reveals development NGOs and the discourses and practices associated with them as an integral part of the post-colonial public sphere. Through examining the moral and practical dilemmas that Ghanaian development workers face, the account opens up a more complex and ambiguous picture of the motives and beliefs that animate such practices. The account suspends critical judgement, in order to produce a more ethnographic understanding of the ontological and epistemological commitments that underpin this work. My concern is not to adjudicate the truth or efficacy of what these actors do, but to understand how they locate truth and efficacy in relation to their own and others’ actions. Correspondingly I aim to understand the practices through which various actors are drawn together in making and remaking the worlds they inhabit, and to understand this world as development practitioners themselves see it. Although certain patterns can be ethnographically discerned, I suggest their acts and pronouncements reveal forms of ideological and moral complexity that are not readily absorbed within existing explanatory frameworks. My own hope, analytically and intellectually, is based on an ethnographic apprehension of the hope that Ghanaian development workers express. For these development workers, hope constitutes a specific ontological commitment they orient themselves towards a different and ‘better’ future, conceived in relation to a plurality of ideological perspectives. It is this ‘ideology’ that sustains various forms of ‘practice’ in the present. Hope is in this sense a way of keeping the world open (Miyazaki 2004: chapter 1), of being alert to the problems and possibilities within it, through the lens of the future. For these development practitioners ‘hope’ and ‘despair’ are not mutually exclusive possibilities, but terms that contain one another: hope in the future prompts despair at the present, just as despair gives rise to future hope. While significant in its own right, for what it shows about development and for what it shows about the post-colonial predicament, this perspective helps point beyond the pessimism endemic to both these literatures. This empirical (and specifically ethnographic) focus reveals the problems and possibilities of development practice in a way that moves us beyond the entrenched ideological oppositions that have

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Introduction 3

informed much analysis. While this should not lead to the wholesale endorsement of development elites, it does nonetheless give pause for reflection: perhaps what is needed is not so much a new panacea for development as a greater understanding of the latent possibilities in what people are already doing. My message is not that an Afropessimism should be replaced by an Afro-optimism (Englund 2006), nor that development cynicism should be replaced by a naive embrace of all that goes under that name. Yet my findings do question these opposed ideological and theoretical positions in ways that do at least offer grounds for hope. The remainder of the chapter elucidates how in relation to the problems and possibilities of existing work. My argument with respect to theories of development and of the post-colonial predicament is that we need to disengage the pessimism from the insight, and that we can only do so through the lens of specific practices. This does not entail a shift from scepticism to naivety, pessimism to optimism. However, it does entail understanding that development organizations and post-colonial publics are radically diverse phenomena; and that in both cases we need to understand how these work, before making suggestions as to how they might work better.

Development, post-development and beyond Since the Second World War, ‘development’ has provided an ideological frame that has appeared to describe and explain social and cultural difference on a global scale (Cooper and Packard 1997b, Mosse 2005a). In 1949, the American President Harry Truman outlined his vision of a ‘bold new programme’, that would bring economic prosperity and technological advancement to ‘underdeveloped’ nations in what subsequently became known as the Third World. Although radical in its vision and transformative in its outcome, the speech fused existing ‘master metaphors’ (Porter 1995) of ‘development’ and ‘progress’. These have a much longer genealogy, including evolutionary notions of ‘progress’ (Watts 1995) – with Africa at the bottom of the scale – and colonial ideals of ‘trusteeship’ (Cowen and Shenton 1995).2 After the Second World War, Truman’s speech gave new impetus to these ideas as the post-colonial world began to dawn. Development was reinvigorated as an ideology capable of delivering a more prosperous and equitable future. Embraced by Western leaders as well as by leaders of the newly emerging independent nations, it provided a utopian vision of a post-colonial future in which all could aspire to

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4


the socio-economic conditions experienced in the West.3 These statist, technocratic and top-down ideologies have subsequently been heavily criticized. However contemporary neo-liberal development discourses leave intact the overarching goal of linear economic and political ‘progress’, even in redefining the means to that end. Successive developmental theories have been refracted in relation to the policies and pronouncements of Ghana’s post-colonial governments. As Ghana’s first president, and as Africa’s first post-colonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah embraced a developmental vision that drew explicit inspiration from Modernization theory. Since the early 1980s, Ghana has been at the forefront of various neo-liberal reform packages, intended to ‘kick-start’ the economy through state retrenchment, market liberalization and ‘good governance’. Critics of Ghana’s developmental policies (e.g. Bright and Dzorgbo 2001) resonate with wider critiques in locating the manifest ‘failures’ of the non-Western world in the idea of ‘development’ and the institutional forms that uphold this. Against the developmental visions of international donors, anthropologists have been central to the ‘postdevelopment’ critique (Cooper and Packard 1997a, Crush 1995a, Esteva 1992, Sachs 1992) that emerged during the late 1980s and 1990s and which continues to hold sway. Arising from a wider post-modern questioning of the superiority of Western forms of knowledge (Asad 2003, Fabian 1983) this has brought to light the negative impacts of an ostensibly progressive developmentalist impulse (e.g. Escobar 1995, Ferguson 1994, Hobart 1993a, Long and Long 1992). In particular, these reveal how an overtly benign impulse to eradicate poverty and promote positive social change often ends up reinscribing the very forms of inequality it purports to overcome. This critique was hugely significant in bringing to light the mechanisms by which the industrialized ‘West’ has continued to exercise control over processes of global change in a post-colonial world. Scholars have suggested that in their discursive construction of ‘poverty’, development institutions objectify an undifferentiated and passive ‘Third World’, whose problems are erroneously attributed to the actions of the people living there (Escobar 1995); that ostensibly neutral technocratic and market-based discourses have acted to depoliticize and hence justify the often partisan interventions of economically powerful states (e.g. Cooper and Packard 1997b, Ferguson 1994, Sachs 1992); and that development organizations marginalize the knowledge of ‘beneficiaries’ by defining ‘problems’ in ways that justify their own forms of ‘expertise’ (Apthorpe 1997, Escobar 1995, Fairhead and Leach 1997, Grillo and Stirrat 1997). Another strand of this critique

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Introduction 5

reveals how development resources are used to bolster the position of educated elites, who exploit their politically and socially privileged positions to the detriment of the poor they are supposed to help (e.g. Ferguson 1994). Together these have made significant contributions in highlighting how overtly progressive discourses produce socially deleterious consequences. Through influencing development policy around issues such as ‘participation’ and ‘indigenous knowledge’ these have had very real, if sometimes ambiguous, consequences for the way in which development is practised. Yet these critiques have led to a number of conceptual difficulties. First, the critical framing of these deconstructive ‘post-development’ approaches (Lewis and Mosse 2006, Yarrow 2008b), has mitigated against nuanced ethnographic understanding. As other anthropologists have recently pointed out (Bornstein 2003, Englund 2006, Friedman 2006, Lewis and Mosse 2006, Mosse 2005a, Yarrow 2008a), the language of critical deconstruction has tended to end up reducing actors’ statements to the supposedly more ‘real’ agendas that analysts then ‘uncover’. The anthropology of development has therefore had the unfortunate effect of dissolving its object of study in the process of describing it (Mosse 2005a). Where analysts assume that the discourses and practices of development are driven by the disguise of power, development workers’ beliefs and actions are reduced to the supposed political ‘functions’. Correspondingly, in assuming that development discourses function to perpetuate social and economic inequality, scholars of development have overlooked actors’ own understandings of the often complex situations in which they find themselves (Mosse 2005a, Yarrow 2008a, Yarrow 2008b). In other words, the views, experiences and understandings of particular development workers are reduced to a reflex of the structural position they occupy. Secondly, a textual and linguistic focus has tended to obscure the specific practices and social relations in which development workers engage. In an influential critique, the geographer Crush asserts the importance of challenging the hegemonic tendencies of development through a focus ‘on the texts and words of development – on the ways that development is written, narrated and spoken; on the vocabularies deployed in development texts to construct the world’ (1995a: 3). Valuable as this deconstructive turn has been in highlighting concealed forms of power, it has had the unfortunate effect of divorcing the words and texts that development organizations produce from the concrete activities and relationships that sustain them. Even in challenging the

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universal applicability of development knowledge, post-development scholars have tended to universalize the practices and processes through which ‘development’ practically unfolds. Thirdly, and consequently, although anthropologists and other scholars of development have been attentive to the social and cultural differences of beneficiary communities, they have rarely paid attention to the geographically specific forms of relationship and understanding through which projects are enacted. In this vein, development workers have been presented as a relatively undifferentiated ‘tribe’ (Watts 1995) and as a sociological group unified by a shared set of common expertise and cosmopolitan values (Ferguson 1994). Because such approaches have confused sociological coherence with the discursive and epistemological coherence that development practitioners achieve, they have tended to overlook considerable and important differences in the geographically and historically specific realities through which ideas of development are made to cohere. Finally, while these problems are methodologically and analytically problematic, they can also be related to a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Candea forthcoming; Quarles Van Ufford and Giri 2003: 17) that has the unfortunate effect of rendering all development practice as part of a hopeless, morally bankrupt project. The actions and beliefs of development practitioners are tautologically reduced to their supposed role in reproducing inequality. This precludes the possibility that such people may actually want to bring about progressive outcomes, and that practices and discourses of development may actually provide a means to those ends. In an attempt to illuminate the promissory potential that development holds, this account builds selectively on recent anthropological scholarship that redirects attention to the concrete practices through which development is enacted (e.g. Bornstein 2003, Friedman 2006, Friedman forthcoming, Lewis and Mosse 2006, Li Murray 2007, Mitchell 2002, Mosse 2005a, Mosse 2005b, Riles 2001). If development is not a coherent set of practices but a set of practices that produce coherence (Mosse 2005a: 1–18), the task is not to deconstruct ‘development’ (as if ‘it’ were a globally coherent entity) but to show how development policies and discourses emerge through diverse forms of relationship, ideology and practice. These developments are useful in directing attention beyond abstract and therefore intractable arguments about ‘development’, to the particular practices and relationships through which ideas of development concretely emerge. The approach therefore dissolves theoretical

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Introduction 7

and analytic disputes about development (in the singular) by treating development as an empirical and ethnographic set of problems and issues. This perspective makes it possible to differentiate between the development ‘baby’ of the better and more equitable futures and the development ‘bathwater’ of the regressive outcomes such interventions may produce – even while showing how the very distinction between ‘success’ and ‘failure’ may in practice be ambiguous and contested. The approach I take draws on various strands of anthropological thinking about development, but ultimately questions the usefulness of ‘the anthropology of development’ as a disciplinary sub-field. My contention is that such an epistemological framing has often contributed to an understanding of ‘development’, as a singular, if complex, set of practices that operate independently of – even if ‘in relation’ to – specific locales. Correspondingly, while anthropologists have been attentive to the social and cultural differences of beneficiary communities and to the ‘counter tendencies’ (Arce and Long 2000) these represent, they have largely ignored the geographically distinct modes of relationship, practice and understanding integral to the enactment of development itself. The account therefore signals a shift from ‘the anthropology of development’, to what might better be described as ‘anthropology with development in it’ (Yarrow and Venkatesan forthcoming). This poses the question of how development practices are configured in relation to complex post-colonial realities. The following section suggests that post-colonial theory provides a useful starting point in approaching these issues but highlights a need to disengage the insight from the pessimism (Karlstrom 2003: 58–63) in much of this literature.

Development in post-colonial theory Over the past two decades, theorists have brought to light new dimensions of the complex social and cultural realities that operate within post-colonial African states. In particular, these reveal how the existence of patron–client relations, in part a legacy of colonial policies of ‘indirect rule’, constitute forms of interpersonal relationship that collapse normative Western distinctions between different domains of life (Mamdiani 1996). In this vein, it has been argued that the ‘the public’ cannot be distinguished from private interests and personal relations (e.g. Ekeh 1975, Mbembe 1992, Mafeje 1971). Elite actors engage in processes of ‘extroversion’ (Bayart 1993: chapter 6), using public positions for personal gain. Similarly, public and private spheres are fused through

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the individual ‘straddling’ (Bayart 1993: chapter 1; chapter 6) of institutionally distinct domains. In the context of the African post-colonial state, a variety of commentators have complicated Foucauldian notions of ‘governmentality’ (Bayart 1993, Chabal and Daloz 1999, Mbembe 1992), arguing that institutional regulation is routinely undermined by personalized political relations. Writing in relation to development institutions and resources, scholars such as Bayart (1986, 1993) and Chabal and Daloz (1999), elaborate how these constitute new forms of ‘resource’ through which longstanding forms of patronage are perpetuated. In this vein they argue that development ‘big men’ use their educational capital to appropriate development funds for personal and patrimonial ends. Elites exploit resources of a dependency that is astutely fabricated, as much as it is externally imposed. In the context of neo-liberal reform, NGOs serve the strategic interests of ‘big-men’, as the state did previously. On the surface, the proliferation of ‘civil society’ organizations appears to constitute a strengthening of the public sphere, yet, in reality, personal relations between NGO and government leaders undermine the autonomy of both. These discussions illuminate important aspects of these social dynamics, and have been critical in moving away from the prevailing normative approaches in which Africa’s difference from ‘the West’ is imagined as a deficit (Chabal 1996, Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). In particular, post-colonial theorists have been instrumental in highlighting the complex ways in which ostensibly Western institutional forms are reconfigured in relation to distinct forms of ideology and practice pertaining to various forms of interpersonal relation. However, these insights are attended by a number of conceptual difficulties. Theorists have portrayed the views and proclamations of African elites as reflexes of the structural positions they occupy within society. Consequently, their proclamations for the ‘public’ good have tended to be viewed as facades hiding malign political intent and selfishness (Werbner 2004: 8). This functionalist and circular logic reduces all proclamations of public good to the reproduction of underlying social and economic inequality. It therefore precludes awareness of the complex ideas and aspirations that motivate such people, produces a misleading, stereotyped understanding of the continent, and reduces elites to dupes of a wider logic: whether of the state or of international development practice. This prevailing Afro-pessimism has concealed considerable moral and ideological complexity and has therefore blinded us to potentially

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Introduction 9

redemptive aspects of elite ideology and practice (cf. Karlstrom 2003, Werbner 2004). An anthropological perspective (and an ethnographic approach) is useful in bringing these elements to light through drawing out the complex relations between the personal, the political and the moral (Werbner 2002). While sociological and political science accounts of African elites have tended to proceed through a relatively abstract and normative focus, an ethnographic perspective reveals a more nuanced understanding of the specific relationships, practices and beliefs through which particular elite groups operate (e.g. Cohen 1981, Hasty 2005, Simpson 2003). Although I situate my argument in relation to a wider critical literature on the post-colonial state in Africa, I join with other recent commentators in suggesting that this analytic focus is simultaneously too general and too particular to adequately account for the social realities that pertain in particular parts of the continent. On the one hand, this leads theorists to overlook important aspects of social, political and historical diversity: post-colonies are radically unalike (Werbner 1996: 4) and it is therefore necessary to locate particular identity strategies in relation to emerging strategies of everyday life. On the other hand, a regional concern with ‘Africa’ has had the effect of hiving off processes taking place within the continent from wider social and economic processes (Chabal 1996). Yet if an analytic focus on ‘Africa’ leads to analyses that attribute an unwarranted coherence to the continent, it is nonetheless important to attend to the ethnographic (empirical) significance of the term (cf. Ferguson 2006). In NGO discourses, as in more widespread debates about development, ideas about ‘Africa’ are invoked in complex and often contradictory ways. For Ghanaian NGO workers, ‘Africa’ emerges as a complex and contradictory entity: if at times ‘it’ signifies a collective sense of despair and a problematic sense of identity, it also inspires hope and commitment.

Towards a new synthesis This analytic framework leads to three basic propositions, in relation to the ethnographic material described within the subsequent chapters of the book. While these derive from Ghanaian ethnography they have implications for theories of development in Africa and more broadly. 1. Development constitutes a set of ideas, meanings and practices, whose significance can only be grasped in relation to the people for whom they matter.

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10


My account highlights how ideas of development matter to various development workers in Ghana, and suggests that we can only begin to understand the multiple and shifting significance of development if we take this fact seriously. A focus on life histories and personal narratives shows how Ghanaian development workers are motivated by related, if sometimes conflicting, understandings of development, and come to understand their own and others’ lives through moral and ethical understandings that are framed in these terms. Analysis of the narratives of Ghanaian development workers reveals how a concern to achieve ‘development’ and ‘progress’ is understood to necessitate the subordination of particular personal interests to the wider interests of society. As such development workers frequently present their own work as a form of ‘sacrifice’. Commitment to development – conceived in a plurality of ideological forms – is understood to entail commitment to a particular kind of self in which ‘ideology’ guides action, even to the extent that this might conflict with materially defined self-interest. Such discourses are drawn on by particular actors in complex and sometimes contradictory ways as explanations and justifications of their own and others’ actions. Even if such morally and ethically progressive claims do at times act to justify people’s social and institutional positions – and the economic and political hierarchies on which these rest – they are not reducible to them. Discourses of ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’ cannot be taken at face value, but neither can they be dismissed out of hand. In practice, they provide a moral framework in which people assess their own and others’ actions. Analysis of the ways in which ideas of development become personally meaningful therefore leads to an understanding of the often complex moral dilemmas that development workers practically face. If the practices of development organizations act to constitute particular kinds of ‘self’, issues of ethics and morality nonetheless emerge as particular subjects shape themselves in relation to these through acts of self-fashioning (Laidlaw 2001, after Foucault: 323). Development workers do not uncritically uphold the logic of an international development ‘machine’, and Ghanaian elites do not simply appropriate development resources after the logic of a selfserving ‘neo-patrimonialism’. In practice, Ghanaian development elites weigh duties and decide where their obligations lie, even to the extent that those obligations and those duties are themselves shaped by wider institutional and social practices (Laidlaw 2001: 315–327).

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Introduction 11

To appreciate these moral complexities, it is necessary to accept that development workers may in principle really wish to be self-sacrificing and altruistic, even if, as development workers themselves highlight, this ideal is not always realized. Both public and scholarly representations of development are polarized between images of aid as an altruistic and selfless act, and those portraying corruption and self-interest (accusations of the latter frequently emerge against the normative ideal of the former).4 This account moves beyond these abstract critiques (cf. Quarles Van Ufford and Giri 2003: 23), by foregrounding development workers’ own discussions of the various dilemmas they face. The suggestion is not that Ghanaian development workers are particularly or intrinsically ‘moral’, but rather that Ghanaian development practice is underscored by forms of moral reasoning that cannot be understood from an analytic perspective that imposes its own normative standards. Taking development workers’ ideological and practical commitments to development seriously entails also taking seriously the hope they place in this concept – however it is variously conceived. Development, by definition, is oriented towards a future set of circumstances that are envisaged as different and ‘better’ than those presently in existence. While post-development theorists have dismissed developmental visions as self-serving and politically regressive, the narratives of Ghanaian development workers complicate this picture. The futuristic orientation of developmental visions may be problematic to the extent that these lead to amnesia about past failures (Crush 1995a: 8–10). But it can also be correlated with more positive virtues. Confronted by a social and political reality that at times prompts despondency and even despair, development promises hope that in turn stimulates particular acts in the present. Visions of a ‘better’ future act as a stimulus to create new projects and programmes, to lobby for greater equality and to build the relationships and knowledge required to make these work. In practice, development workers often acknowledge that these may have negative effects, even where they appear, or are made to appear, to ‘succeed’. Yet development workers keep alive hope in the overall project of development, even when particular projects seem to fail. The point is not that such visions of development are necessarily ‘positive’, but that they may arise from ideologies and motives that are not simplistically reducible to self-interest or the consolidation of political inequality. Moreover, if the consequences of such visions

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12


are not straightforwardly beneficial (and hence post-development theorists are right to caution us that these should not be taken at face value) the question of what these achieve should be an open one, to be ethnographically pursued. 2. Development operates through strategic simplifications, whose logic needs to be understood in its own terms. Ghanaian development workers create and depend upon forms of knowledge that simplify the realities they work within. In order to bring to light how and why such simplifications are valued, this account moves beyond a focus on texts and documents, to foreground the interpersonal relations and concrete activities through which these emerge (Riles 2001, 2006b). My account reveals how a series of oppositions are constructed, used and understood within various development contexts. In practice, oppositions such as those between ‘local’ and ‘global’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’, and ‘policy’ and ‘practice’ are not as simplistic or static as a textual reading might lead one to believe. These oppositions do not simply exist as textual representations but are enacted through complex forms of practice by which various kinds of people, artefacts and technologies are assembled and separated in the context of particular projects, programmes and interventions.5 While a focus on relationships and practices reveals a degree of complexity that development knowledge ostensibly conceals, it also reveals the fluid and mobile ways in which oppositions are constructed in relation to complex forms of relationship and identity. My account highlights the role of development workers in the construction of such oppositions and by the same token illuminates how people are in turn constructed by these. Oppositions intrinsic to development practice are used by development actors to understand themselves, their identities and the predicaments in which they find themselves. Such oppositions are not therefore simple ‘mystifications’ to be deconstructed in order to reveal an underlying ‘reality’; they are intrinsic to the reality that development actors occupy (Yarrow 2008b). Apparently simplistic dichotomies therefore allow a range of development actors to articulate ideas and interests not reducible to the binary logics on which they sometimes draw. Understanding development knowledge and discourses in relation to the material and inter-subjective contexts through which they are produced sheds new light on the form of this knowledge. Rather than a poor substitute for the ostensibly more sophisticated and complex

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Introduction 13

analyses of academia, it is more useful to think of development and academic practice as distinct epistemological endeavours, fed by different interests and motivations (Green forthcoming, Lea 2002, Li Murray 2007, Riles 2001) – a point further developed in the concluding chapter. Critiques of development that simply point to the social or cultural complexities that development workers overlook therefore miss the point. In fact development professionals bring about various kinds of strategic simplification. Post-development critiques rightly highlight how these abstractions can be used to subvert the knowledge of beneficiary communities and to consolidate the authority of development ‘experts’ (Apthorpe 1997, Crush 1995a, Hobart 1993b). However, this position problematically leads to the de facto dismissal of simplification and abstraction as necessarily problematic endeavours. In practice, forms of knowledge that work through detachment and abstraction may be employed to yield insights that beneficiary communities value. This account demonstrates that although they may be employed to consolidate political inequality, they may equally be employed with politically subversive intent. In elucidating the practices through which such oppositions are constructed, the account also points to the contingencies upon which these rest. Although post-development theorists have rightly highlighted the ‘power of development’ (Crush 1995a), it is therefore necessary to recognize that even discourses of the powerful are not powerful everywhere and all of the time (Latour 1999, Jensen and Wintheriek forthcoming). 3. Development practice is configured through historically specific social and cultural realities. In focusing on the history through which the contemporary Ghanaian NGO movement emerged, my account reveals the continuing significance of a longer-term history of activism for contemporary development practice. In particular, it shows how many of the ‘NGO pioneers’ trace continuities between their current activities as NGO workers, and former engagements in various forms of social and political activism. I suggest that rather than bracket this history out as ‘local context’, we need to appreciate how forms of ideology and interpersonal relationships with a geographically and historically specific trajectory, are integral to the ways in which contemporary development organizations work. If the coherence of development knowledge is ‘after the fact’ (Mosse 2005b) of development practice, it is therefore necessary to appreciate how such practices are shaped in relation to specific interests, relationships and ideologies.

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14


Tracing the emergence of the NGO sector in relation to the life histories of key individuals also sheds light on the place of development NGOs in a wider public sphere. In Ghana, as in much of Africa, NGOs have flourished over the past three decades in response to international donor policies that have brought about state retrenchment and provided new funds to develop ‘civil society’ (see Chapter 1). While such organizations have created new ideological and discursive opportunities, it is important not to overemphasize their transformative effects. In Ghana, NGOs constitute one potential arena of public action in a much broader institutional landscape. Life histories reveal considerable fluidity in the ways that people shift between these ostensibly distinct spheres. Development professionals describe how personal commitments to political and social ideologies necessitate movement between different institutional and professional contexts, as different practical opportunities arise (see Lewis 2008). By the same token, interpersonal relationships based on past engagements are often utilized in the creation of formal and informal networks linking NGOs to other public actors and bodies, including politicians, the media and various international development organizations. While such relations might be explained in terms of a neo-patrimonial logic, by which elites ‘straddle’ formally distinct spheres and appropriate development resources to their own self-interest (e.g. Chabal and Daloz 1999), my own analysis points to a potentially more positive conclusion. Ghanaian development elites themselves acknowledge that interpersonal relations are at times used to further personal interests, but also highlight how these are central to the enactment of various forms of public ‘good’. If informal personal relations may at times compromise non-governmental public action, they are also central to the construction of networks and coalitions through which various organizations and bodies seek to further distinct social and ideological visions of a better future. My account highlights the specificity of the Ghanaian situation and suggests that these specificities are important in their own right. In doing so, it also makes a more general point: historical and geographic specificities are important to any understanding of what development is and means. Development is not a singular globally universal form of knowledge, but a way of assembling the world through geographically and historically particular actions. In other words, I am suggesting that development is not an ‘external’ set of ‘global’ practices that floats above pre-existing ‘local’ social and

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Introduction 15

cultural differences; these discourses and practices are themselves used to negotiate and frame personal and collective identities in ways that only make sense in the context of wider understanding of particular regions. Chapter 1 examines how, through an exploration of actors’ own narratives of the historical emergence of the Ghanaian NGO sector.

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Part I Ideology

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1 The Politics of Charity

History in person Mawuli has a slight frame and a boyish grin that seem to belie his age and authority. Now in his late 40s, he is the programme director for one of Ghana’s leading advocacy non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and a public figure of considerable repute. We are talking in his airconditioned office over the coffee and croissants that he has ordered as a late breakfast. He is dressed in a brightly coloured ‘local batik’ shirt that seems a deliberate understatement of status. Round gold glasses frame sparkling eyes, animated by the fervour and passion with which he speaks. Even as we are exchanging pleasantries he talks in long elegant sentences. He finishes his coffee and I ask what led him to the work he does today. His answer takes us back to his childhood, and to a set of experiences and ideas that seem oddly out of kilter with the sterile office in which we are sitting. Well, my parents are both dead now but they were both peasants. My father started as a peasant farmer and he became a dock worker but ended up back in the village. And my mother became a kind of trader – a food trader. His parents were poor but managed to send him to a Catholic boarding school. There he became interested in the work of a range of French philosophers who seemed to make sense of some of the inequalities he saw between his parents’ world and the world he was educated into: You see, if you come from a peasant community and you are confronted by peasant suffering and material depravation in peasant 19

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Ideology

society, which does not sit with the fact that that peasant society is a part of a so-called modern society and wealth, which is the world that I was growing up in and becoming part of. And yet that peasant society also has a particular world outlook – the peasant traditional outlook: faith and destiny and all those things. Your search for answers is also a part of a search in contradiction to the peasant view of things. This search led to the work of Sartre, Gide and Kessler, and later, during his time at university, to the work of radical socialists including Karl Marx. Not by nature a rebel, Mawuli came to realize the futility of achieving his ambition of providing material support for all those who depended on him – his parents and siblings and beyond that the village he came from. He began to see that ‘the solutions lay in a radical transformation of society’. At university in the late 1970s and early 1980s, much of his time was occupied in trying to pursue this vision of an ‘alternative society’, of equity of opportunity and wealth. This personal crusade took place against the ‘mass corruption’ and ‘economic stagnation’ of the 1970s and the explicitly Marxist challenge of the coups that brought Jerry Rawlings to power, first in 1979 and then again in 1981. Mawuli became involved in a number of ‘fronts of struggle’, working for a variety of political organizations who lent ideological and practical support to the nascent ‘socialist revolution’. By 1984, however, he had become increasingly disillusioned with the revolutionary process. The socialist rhetoric of Rawlings’ People’s National Defence Committee was not borne out in the neo-liberal economic policies it began to pursue. The regime began to suffer from the kinds of corruption it had initially railed against. Frustrated with Ghanaian politics, Mawuli decided to continue his education, earlier curtailed by the pursuit of a political vision. A scholarship allowed him to move to the UK to undertake a Master’s. In Ghana, the socialist movement continued to unravel, so that when the scholarship funding ran out, he stayed on, working in a number of menial jobs in order to make ends meet, and continuing his struggle for the socialist principles he believed in. ‘I worked in a French restaurant and the chef and I spent a lot of time talking about Jean Paul Sartre as we prepared the courgette and the fois gras!’ A number of those he had known through political activism in Ghana were in exile in the UK. He kept in touch socially, but disengaged from their broader political project: My view was that you took your politics where you found it; try to see what is possible given the situation where you were. I did not

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The Politics of Charity 21

think there was any possibility of reviving the Left in Ghana. What I saw for myself was a better education for myself, not simply a career thing, a political education that tried to get as much knowledge as possible in a variety of political groups and projects. So for me it was a moment of trying to learn. Mawuli hadn’t planned on staying long but events conspired against return: in Ghana an increasingly authoritarian regime made political activism futile; in the UK he became involved in a plethora of organizations including the Conference of Socialist Economists, Socialist Worker and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Then in 1994 the political situation in Ghana ‘opened up’, following the official return of multi-party democracy. Along with two other exiled political activists he returned to Ghana to set up the advocacy NGO that he now co-directs: From our analysis what was needed then was some kind of organization, a vehicle of political organization which allowed you to engage with some of the simple but profound problems – like working to defend people’s human rights, working to defend people’s legal rights, which was simple but not looking very politically revolutionary like we did in the 80s. The NGO movement provided the practical means by which to continue the pursuit of a broader set of ideological aims. Mawuli explains his own evolution from political activist to NGO pioneer as part of a wider process: For a long time NGOs in Ghana were not into advocacy: they were charities. All the policy work, the activism, was left to so-called progressive movements. The destruction of those movements meant that NGOs were the only places that you could raise those issues of policy. So charity work was directly turned into policy work. If the transformation of the political movements of the 1980s into the non-governmental movement of the 1990s entailed the de-politicization of their activism, it also resulted in the politicization of the NGO sector as a whole. NGOs were embraced as a vehicle to enact political change, as former socialist activists were forced to accommodate to a reconfigured institutional and ideological reality.

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Ideology

Mawuli’s narrative highlights a distinctly personal set of ideologies, motivations and choices but is also revealing of a wider trajectory: in Ghana, a broadly socialist political movement emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was later transformed into the ‘non-governmental’ movement that began to develop in the 1990s following the return to formal multi-party democracy. Reflecting on the significance of these historical developments, Sulley (Box 5.1), another former political activist now working in the NGO sector, explains: You can see that those [people] that emerged out of that period and the history of the civil movement in the country are those who are at the forefront of development work or the NGO world. I mean you just go through all the NGOs – they are all products of that period in the country’s history [ ... ]. Younger NGO workers are also aware of the significance of this history. Tse, now in his mid 30s, works for an international NGO having previously worked for one of the leading national NGOs. Though he did not participate in these developments, he also underscores their ongoing importance: You see a sort of clique, a cohort, of people spreading out to form NGOs in that period. We are talking about a political factor and then a lot of people supported the [Rawlings] regime. The leaders would have known themselves very well. You see they all happened to be in university during a particular period. And then the students supported the government. So within that period there was this sort of camaraderie created. This chapter examines this history through the narratives of those involved. It highlights how the present activities of NGOs are practically and ideologically connected to earlier forms of activism and reveals how an ostensibly ‘global’ set of donor policies have been configured in the context of a geographically specific set of political struggles. These are not simply struggles ‘within’ the public sphere but about its very nature and existence.

The rise of NGOs The past three decades have seen the global proliferation of NGOs on an unprecedented scale. This ‘global associational explosion’ (Fischer

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1997: 440) has been supported by different strands of thinking that have converged in their reassessment of the role of the state as the natural locus of economic growth and development. With the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, it seemed that a new ideological consensus had been reached, an idea captured in Francis Fukuyama’s now infamous phrase, ‘the end of history’ (1992).1 If previous political and economic problems lay in dictatorial and bureaucratic states, the solution was to be found in the rejuvenation of ‘the market’ and an increasing role for an autonomous ‘civil society’. In the 1980s neo-liberal economic policies, pursued by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), led to dramatic state retrenchment and to the encouragement of NGOs as more ‘innovative’ and ‘efficient’ alternatives to effective service provision. 2 The expansion of the NGO sector continued into the 1990s as donors began to promote ‘good governance’ through the expansion of ‘civil society’. 3 From a previously peripheral role, NGOs were increasingly embraced as the solution to welfare service delivery, democratization and development (Fischer 1997). This chapter does not dispute the significance of donor policy in promoting these institutional forms, but suggests that the material and discursive resources accompanying these policies create possibilities that are not reducible to a single global logic. By focusing on NGO workers’ own understandings of this history, the chapter locates the emergence of the Ghanaian NGO movement in relation to the relationships and ideological positions of earlier forms of activism (Dorman 2005, Jackson 2005, Pommerolle 2005). In particular it highlights the tensions that result from activists’ attempts to exploit institutional and discursive possibilities resulting from broader donor policies against their ideological grain. As self-professed socialists, many of the NGO ‘pioneers’ are highly critical of the neo-liberal agenda of donors and Western governments. In terms that echo post-development critics, they highlight the role of international aid agencies in perpetuating the interests of the powerful to the detriment of the poor. Yet these activists’ recognition of the ideological limits of these institutions does not lead to the wholesale rejection of ‘development’. Rather they seek to exploit the institutional spaces that emerge for their own political and ideological ends. While this is understood to produce tensions, and even compromise, they hold that compromised action is preferable to the comfort of ideologically purist inactivity.

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Revolutionary beginnings On 31 December 1981, Jerry Rawlings, a low-ranking flight lieutenant, became the president of Ghana when he overthrew the democratically elected Limann government in what he termed a ‘popular revolution’.4 Despite the use of force, this explicitly was not a ‘coup’ as elucidated in the first radio broadcast he made to the nation: Fellow citizens of Ghana, as you would have noticed, we are not playing the national anthem. In other words, this is not a coup. I ask for nothing less than a revolution, something that would transform the social and economic order of this country ... We are asking for nothing more than to organize the country in such a way that nothing will be done from the Council, whether by God or the devil, without the consent of the people.5 In the name of ‘the people’, the revolution aimed to unite ‘workers’, ‘peasants’ and low echelons of the military along with radical intellectuals against the ‘old order’ of businessmen, professionals and chiefs (Hansen 1991, Nugent 1996). The rhetoric of the ‘revolution’ was explicitly Marxist, deploying the notion of ‘class struggle’ and advocating ‘mass participation’ in politics. Emmanuel Hansen,6 a Ghanaian historian and onetime minister in the Rawlings government, has remarked upon the strangeness of this situation, noting the paradox of a government announcing a ‘people’s revolution’ to the people (quoted in Nugent 1996: 17). Despite the populist rhetoric, initial support came from a relatively small section of society. A variety of organizations, many originating in the university campuses, provided vocal support and were a significant factor in establishing the regime (Jeffries 1989, Nugent 1996). Of the many organizations that appeared during this era, the June Fourth Movement (JFM) and the New Democratic Movement (NDM) were particularly important. The JFM was the largest7 and initially exerted a high degree of influence on the regime.8 Founded after the coup that brought Rawlings to power in 1979, it aimed to uphold the ideals for which the revolution was undertaken. Following Rawlings’ second coup in 1981, the organization rapidly expanded. Many of the leadership were given influential positions in the Provisional National Defence Council, the Interim Coordinating Committee, Workers’ Defence Committees and other organizational structures intended to consolidate the revolution. Although the NDM shared JFM’s disillusionment with the political

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and economic situation that developed during the 1970s, it was highly critical of the un-democratic means by which Rawlings took power.9 Despite this initial position of ‘critical support’, a number of NDM leadership later became key players in various organizations closely associated with the revolution (Hansen 1987, 1991). Tacit support for the revolution also came from a variety of Catholic organizations, including Pax Romana and the Young Christian Students (YCS). Loosely referred to as the Young Catholic Movement, members of these organizations (‘Young Catholics’) connected their religious orientation to a less overtly political stance. Nonetheless these drew ideological inspiration from the teachings of liberation theologists such as Bishop Romero and Paolo Freire and saw affinity between their own concern to build a more egalitarian society, and the socialist aims of the revolution. Ideological disputes and differences of approach often led to bitter wrangling between members of these various organizations. Despite this, political activists and Young Catholics shared the sense that the predicament of the country called for radical change. Activists working for various pro-Rawlings groups located support for the revolution in the economic and political circumstances of the 1970s. During his time as a student at the University of Ghana, Legon, Samuel worked ‘behind the scenes’ for a range of organizations, including the then radically socialist National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) and the JFM. He suggests that among these groups, support for the revolution came from disillusionment with the corruption, brutality and economic mismanagement of earlier military dictators: Change was necessary. Change was really needed in those days. There was a lot of trouble from the Acheampong regime. Every year campus would be closed down because of conflict between students and the military government. Soldiers would march onto campus and students would run away and the campus would be closed down. So definitely there was a need for change. At the time, a range of ideological currents seemed to converge in a sense that the future lay in the socialist transformation of society. Emmanuel (Box 1.1) now works as a development consultant but was a prominent member of the JFM. He explains how such left-wing movements drew upon a broader set of ideas: Internationally you had the struggle for national liberation, a period of what I call African nationalism, which had an impact on those

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of us that were at university at the time. There was a sense of hope: that change was possible, that life was about change that had to be brought about by active struggle. More specifically activists drew a sense of hope from the ideological orientation that the revolution seemed to represent. Sulley (Box 5.1), who was active in the NUGS leadership and later in the JFM, explains: ‘The regime at that time aimed at changing the fundamentals of society, the way people relate to each other, how the national cake is distributed, what path we should take in terms of development.’ Concretely activists supported the regime through a range of activities. As a member of the central organizing committee of NUGS, Sulley describes student leaders’ decision to set up a task-force: We thought there were urgent things to be done, you know, and therefore we did not see why we should be in school studying when there were all these urgent things that needed to be done. So we decided that the universities were going to be closed for three months. [ ... ] It was a short-term thing to allow the regime to stabilize [and] also as part of the stabilization, to get people involved at the local level in community development and therefore to gain a better idea of the issues and the problems. Young Catholics located their support for the revolution in a similar sense of disillusionment. Peter now divides his time between working as an academic and setting up an NGO. During the early 1980s, he was active in various organizations in the Young Catholic Movement. He describes how his political radicalization emerged from dismay at the circumstances he saw around him growing up in the 1970s: ‘By the late seventies things were really rotten in Ghana. I mean it was no more a country, it was a jungle.’ In this context, the Rawlings regime seemed to resonate with the sense of many Young Catholics that the solutions to the country’s problems lay in socialist revolution: At that time many of the things that Rawlings was talking about, about justice in society, fairness and so on, these were all ideas that we were talking about, we were discussing. So if somebody were to speak like that, would you say he was talking as a military man, that he has made a coup and so on? When we have seen all the injustices coming from our own society? No.

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Box 1.1 Emmanuel I come from the North of Ghana and my interest in development work came partly from that. Living in a place where development is lacking, where you are constantly confronted by social difficulties and inequalities, it is difficult not to develop a deep concern about social welfare. But the intellectual climate during my youth also helped shape the path I took. Particularly during my time as a student there was a lot of awareness about these sorts of issues with liberation struggles and a strong sense of African nationalism. These also helped me to develop a social consciousness – to want to bring about social change. And of course that also meant political change. During those days it wasn’t like now. There was a sense of hope, that change was possible, that life was about change that had to be brought about by active struggle. In 1978 I went to the University of Ghana. At that time there was a group of us from the North. We’d all experienced similar things and we wanted to do something about it. So we set up an organization, which was to lobby for the rights of farmers displaced by a World Bank funded dam project. I also got involved with a number of other organizations. There was the JFM, which at that time was dominated by a lot of the same people. We all supported Rawlings at that time. The ideas he was talking about resonated with the kinds of things we were also talking about – the need to stop corruption and for greater social equality. Following the coup of 1981 I started working for the government, but over time ideological disagreements emerged. I started to speak out and then in 1982 was arrested and imprisoned for a year. After that I didn’t see that much could be done working in Ghana and I also felt personally unsafe. So that was when I went to the UK. At that time there were a group of us there, who had similar ideas and had been through similar kinds of things. We didn’t always see eye to eye on everything but we collaborated in opposing Rawlings and trying to bring about political change. We did things like producing anti-Rawlings propaganda, which we sent to our fellow friends and activists who had stayed in Ghana. Exile life was frustrating; it’s a kind of existence that’s far removed from reality. At that time I got involved in the London voluntary sector. Some of us from the Student Movement founded an NGO to help support Ghanaian refugees. That at least provided a grassroots connection. Later I did a PhD. I was in a British university but the research was in West Africa so I began returning home periodically. By that time things had opened up a bit. Then after the doctorate I started working for a donor organization as a field officer in West Africa. People say a lot of things about donor organizations – that you’re always compromised – and maybe that’s true. But for me it provided a way to be more practically engaged. The kind of political rhetoric that came out of the organizations I engaged with during the 1980s has some value but if it doesn’t make a difference to people’s lives there’s no point.

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For Peter, desperate times called for radical action. Rawlings’ brutal means were justified by a shared ideological end. Now a respected ‘NGO pioneer’ Charles (Box 4.1) was also involved in the leadership of the Catholic Youth Movement during the 1980s. Though considerably more circumspect about the ‘brutal’ methods the regime employed, he similarly describes how the ideological convictions of the leadership of the Catholic Youth led to broad sympathy with the revolutionary process: Most of the people in the Catholic Student movement – the leadership – at that time could align themselves with the 1979 thing. Because it was a revolution that came to talk for the poor against corruption and all that. [...] Some of us, including myself, were sympathetic to the cause. Not to the judicial killing and all of that but to the whole idea of creating a power balance between the workers and the poor and the hierarchical powers and so on. [...] And some of us [in the Young Catholic Movement] were sympathetic to it, though we didn’t come out openly and be a part to it, we were sympathetic to it. These sentiments are echoed by Albert (Box 3.2), another Catholic Youth leader who now directs one of the country’s largest national NGOs: At that time we were friends with the government. Because the government talked about revolution, we also talked about revolution. The government talked about social change, we also talked about social change. The government talked about options for the poor, and we also talked about options for the poor, because the government at that time had its roots in the poor and the marginalized in society. So we were allies with the government. Despite organizational and ideological differences between a range of progressive organizations, in practice people frequently moved between these. Many of those active in the Young Catholic Movement during the 1980s were concurrently active in progressive movements such as the NDM and JFM. Personal relations often developed between people in these movements through involvement in student politics. Thomas, was active in the Young Catholic Movement at university and describes how differences between the aims and ideologies of these organizations were often unimportant in relation to their wider political and social

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goals: ‘There were plenty of clashes. But our common objective was that we wanted to bring about change.’ Kwesi (Chapter 2), a prominent member of the NDM, similarly describes the personal and ideological overlap between these groups: We had all worked in the regime at different times and at different levels and I’m sure, you know, we even had a certain overlap of views. We were not all coming out of a Catholic humanist tradition but we actually collaborated. While ideological differences led to fierce disputes, members of these various organizations shared recognition of the need for change along broadly socialist principles. This not only led to strategic coalitions but also to close relationships that connected ostensibly discrete organizations in a complex network of overlapping ties.

Dissent goes underground In 1984, finance minister Kwesi Botchwey devised an economic plan aimed at overcoming the problems of economic stagnation within the country, through adoption of a neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programme. Donor support in the form of the IMF’s Economic Recovery Programme was contingent on the acceptance of a variety of economic ‘conditionalities’, including privatization of state companies, retrenchment of government agencies and various anti-protectionist measures. For many of Rawlings’ previous supporters, the move represented the culmination of the regime’s movement away from the socialist ideologies on which it was ostensibly founded. Lucas (Box 1.2), a JFM leader who worked as regional coordinator of the Defence Committees, describes his decision to resign: Whereas we were asking for the more radical more participatory, more grass-roots method [ ... ] Rawlings aligned himself with some economists [ ... ] who prepared a quick fix. This sense of ‘ideological betrayal’ was accompanied by dismay at the increasingly brutal tactics adopted: The ideas for which we had supported him had been aborted; he was like any military dictator who has seized power. He was more interested in power than the development of the people.

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Box 1.2 Lucas I was a Catholic by upbringing and that’s how I first came in contact with radical thinking – through the writings and teachings of Bishop Romero. His ideas struck a chord with me – in fact with a lot of us. At secondary school I got really involved in a group called the Bishop Romero Youth for Development, which undertook voluntary activities such as helping the poor and the sick and helping with the construction of schools and clinics. So that kind of social consciousness was there even before I went to university. But it was at university that I really started to get politically engaged. I was at the University of Ghana between 1980 and 1985, when campus was quite a radical place to be. We were supporting the government in whatever way we could – taking cocoa to the ports in order to raise foreign currency through export; that kind of thing. Actually there were quite a number of us from the Young Catholic Movement. I was basically quite central to all the political developments that were taking place at that time. But in 1982 ideological disagreements became increasingly apparent between those of us on the Left who still believed the revolution should be about the socialist ideals it started out with and some others who wanted to take it away from that. We were asking for the more radical, more participatory, more grass-roots methods, relying as much as possible on the general methods of generating wealth. After we left, the regime became pretty brutal and oppressive. It was obvious to all of us that Rawlings was becoming a dictator. So along with a number of other former friends and colleagues, I helped set up the United Revolutionary Front. Basically we were aiming to bring about a return to democracy. Open defiance of the regime wasn’t really possible so most of what we did happened underground. Actually, at that time, many of my friends and colleagues from the JFM and Student Movement had moved to the UK. We all faced a lot of persecution and understandably people didn’t want to stay in Ghana. But I thought it was important to be here in order to provide the link. For example I helped distribute anti-Rawlings publications. I worked doing a menial civil service job which gave me the financial support to keep on going with my political work. In 1991 things got particularly bad: the regime had become really brutal. I got beaten up a lot and then I got arrested and imprisoned without trial for three months. Democracy returned in 1992, which was actually when our political movement collapsed. We’d taken a gamble and it hadn’t worked. I still believed in the same things, but there wasn’t really an outlet for putting them into practice. But that’s also when the NGO movement really started taking off and that gave a lot of us a new outlet for pursuing our ideals. In 1998 I started working for one of the country’s leading NGOs. It had a lot of the same kind of people working for it that had taken part in activism on campus and through organizations like JFM. I spearheaded the organization’s anti-privatization campaign, so I was very much pursuing the same kinds of ideals. But I got frustrated with being part of a well-established NGO and wanted to do my own thing. Now I’m pursuing the same kinds of things but through my own NGO.

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Towards the end of the 1980s, the political culture within Ghana became increasingly authoritarian. The dangers of speaking out against the government led to the inhibition of any form of public dissent, a predicament popularly expressed as the ‘culture of silence’ (Nugent 1996, Yankah 1998). Sulley (Box 5.1), who actively supported the regime in its initial stages, describes how a growing sense of disillusionment coincided with a dawning of the recognition of their own short-sightedness: Naively, we thought that with structures from the top we could transform society. But as it turned out, and as we realized, the military as an institution has been built and developed to shape certain interests. And there’s so far that you can push it and beyond that it won’t go. We focused on the power structures at the top without building the base, so when that reaction set in, there was very little support from the ground, to protect us. During this period, the different ideological orientations of the more politically oriented activists and the more religiously oriented Young Catholics led to a divergence of approach. Simon (Box 1.3) was active in both and explains: ‘The Christian politics is less threatening in a direct way to state power. [ ... ] State power engagement is a lot more risky. So people went different ways: some people stayed with the Catholic process; some went into anti-state engagement and those kinds of things.’ During the 1980s, NGOs began to proliferate across Africa, in part as a response to changing donor policy. Against the backdrop of the economic and political crises that plagued Africa throughout the 1970s (Nugent 2004), the World Bank published ‘Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa’ (World Bank 1981), charting the way forward through market liberalization and a correspondingly reduced role for the state.10 In Ghana, the first professionally staffed national NGOs were set up with the aim of providing various kinds of ‘service’, including the provision of water, sanitation, health and educational facilities, to impoverished communities. Many of these organizations were founded by those who had been active in the Young Catholic Movement. Charles (Box 4.1) was one of these and explains the rationale that led him and other leaders of the Young Catholic Movement to set up NGOs in this period: When we were youth leaders or student leaders there was a lot we said, a lot of noise we made about options for the poor. [The NGO] would provide us the vehicle to put those words into practice. So

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Box 1.3 Simon I was born in a rural village in the Upper East Region. My parents were poor but at the time the education system was good so it was possible to do well by pure merit. As one of the few educated people in the village I was made assistant secretary of the village development association. I guess all that experience was very formative in the development of my social perspective, but it was through involvement in the Young Catholic Movement and liberation theology that I really began to think about social issues more systematically. In 1979 I went to the University of Ghana where I became very actively involved in student politics as a member of the Student Representative Council, which at the time was dominated by radical socialists – actually, lots of the people who are now at the forefront of the NGO movement. I was also involved in the JFM and it was in that general socialist atmosphere my ideas began to take political shape. At the same time I also retained my interest and faith in Catholicism. Lots of the people I knew through involvement in YCS at school were also on campus, so I also kept in touch with them. In 1984 I helped to set up the NGO CHD, where I was one of two coordinators paid to run the organization in the year after it was set up. That was an attempt by some like-minded people to try to put into practice the socialist principles we’d been talking about on campus. After that I got involved in a National Service rural development project, working alongside Charles [Box 4.1]. At National Service, I was also in charge of an urban development project, that later developed into one of the country’s largest national NGOs. Shortly after I’d helped to set that up, I left the country to undertake a Master’s in the Netherlands. That was followed by a period working for a number of different NGOs in Malaysia, Africa and the UK. Then in 1994 I was back in the UK, and that was when I began talking to Kwesi and Sulley about the possibility of setting up an advocacy NGO. In 1995 those discussions culminated in our return to Ghana to set up the regional office of what has become one of the country’s most influential advocacy NGOs.

that was the strong motivation around it. And then also there was this sense ... like 1983 was the time that we had this severe famine in Ghana and it was very clear that most of the people coming to the assistance of Ghanaians were foreign institutions, foreign NGOs. So again we thought, why should it be? Where are the Ghanaians, you know, intellectuals and so on? Young Catholics took advantage of new sources of funding that became available in the 1980s to set up a range of NGOs. These attempted to respond to social and economic problems that partly resulted from donor-backed state retrenchment. Beyond these immediate aims,

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however, these organizations also enabled the pursuit of social visions broadly derived from the teachings of liberation theologists. During this period, many of those in the progressive movements took a more overtly political approach, attempting to destabilize the regime. Though formal dissent was impossible, activists continued to meet covertly. Sulley (Box 5.1) was an active student leader and a member of the JFM. During this period he gave up on political activism and moved back home to live with his parents in the North: [During] the time of the falling out with Rawlings [ ... ] it was not possible to organize at the national level. And even at the local level, you couldn’t do it so openly because then you were targeted by the regime. But then you knew who shared the same ideas met in these study circles to discuss. Members of various progressive organizations describe how they were forced to ‘go underground’, working illicitly within the country or going into exile. Some articulated wider dissatisfactions through speaking out publicly on issues of workers’ rights; others used pseudonyms to write critical columns in newspapers and journals. Many of the JFM and NDM moved to the UK, attempting to unseat Rawlings through external lobbying and the publication and dissemination of critical literature. Simon (Box 1.3) was active in the Young Catholic Movement and the JFM in the early 1980s but moved to the UK where he continued his education. He explains: ‘Everybody got out by a certain point. You know, by 1984, 85, virtually all the left-wing student movement folks who were meddling with the Rawlings regime were out.’ A number of former members of the JFM and NDM were imprisoned, while others were beaten and physically intimidated. During this period some gave up on activism altogether, seeing the pursuit of their social and political aspirations as a futile task in the political climate that prevailed.

Non-governmental politics In 1989, the World Bank published Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (World Bank 1989), placing emphasis on the central role of ‘governance’ in achieving sustained development. If Africa’s developmental failures lay not in the absence of raw materials, technology or infrastructure, as previously supposed, but rather in the lack of democratic and accountable institutions, then the way forward, it seemed, was to reform these institutions.

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In Ghana these policies led to increased pressure on the Rawlings government. Elections were held in 1992 as an IMF and World Bank condition of ongoing donor backing. As head of the governing National Defence Committee, Rawlings was able to use access to state institutions and state media to buy votes and disseminate propaganda (Brydon and Legge 1996). Behind the veneer of multi-party democracy, patrimonialism and authoritarianism persisted (Bright and Dzorgbo 2001). Nonetheless, the formal return to multi-party democracy coincided with new sources of funding, intended to encourage NGOs and strengthen ‘civil society’. Often uncritically conflated with ‘civil society’ (Bornstein 2005), NGOs were regarded as bulwarks against authoritarian and undemocratic regimes and as representatives of the wider ‘public voice’.11 In line with wider changes throughout Africa, NGOs emerged from a relatively marginal role to be seen as a panacea for social and economic development (Amanor et al. 1993).12 Despite opposition to the liberal ideologies behind these developments, NGO pioneers relate how an increasingly liberal dispensation created ‘new opportunities’. As a political movement became ‘nongovernmental’, so the non-governmental sector took on a distinctly political character. Many of those forced ‘underground’ and into exile during the late 1980s took strategic advantage of the new institutional spaces and resources that opened up. Activists describe how connections to various external donors made it possible to continue to pursue political visions with roots in the progressive movements of the early 1980s. Samuel works as programme director for an international NGO and participated in various progressive organizations during the early 1980s. He describes how donor resources made it possible to undermine the authoritarian political culture that developed in the late 1980s: Civil society can get the donors on their side to ensure that government is doing the right thing and being transparent. Because once donors are providing the money then civil society can use that to make sure that donors are making the government accountable and transparent. Echoing these sentiments, Mawuli explains how such resources have enabled his NGO to pursue a set of socialist ideologies: You can get money from the government of Britain in terms that allow you to do your own work. When they begin to insist, you say fuck off! I am not going to take money from international donors

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under a programme which I think is damned negative. I will take money which allows me to say what I can say. More generally, NGOs have used the donor resources that emerged in the 1990s to further a variety of social and political visions, sometimes at a direct tangent to donors’ own ideological orientations. Although many of those at the forefront of the Ghanaian NGO movement remain radically opposed to economic globalization along neo-liberal lines, they recognize the possibilities that media and technological globalization enable, specifically in terms of the development of a ‘global civil society’. Lucas (Box 1.2) directs a national NGO that has been at the forefront of attempts to oppose the government backed policy of water privatization. He describes the importance of global coalitions in furthering domestic advocacy on these issues: I can now talk to other NGOs in Holland, UK, US, Canada, who on the basis of social and economic justice are agreeing with me and are not afraid to say that. And they will go onto the streets and say yes! So the globalization of the issue of rights is one positive fallout of economic globalization. Where emails are now available we can communicate – the Internet provides us with a huge area of information and all kinds of things. So in a sense globalization has actually aided the massing together of the growing closeness of civil society globally. So that has been very useful, such that as we talk now NGOs globally now are signing a letter that they are sending to the IMF, the World Bank and the Republic of Ghana in support of a fresh struggle we have just launched. If the emergence of new kinds of funding and support creates possibilities, Ghanaian NGO workers also point to the problems that attend these. Lucas (Box 1.2) articulates a widespread view that donor funding leads to a culture of dependency that stifles debate: NGOs, because they are often funder dependent, that has also created a problem. Because I now find some of my colleagues in quite a number of sectors who are outspoken and supportive, speaking less because they don’t want to upset the funders. Chris (Box 5.3) echoes these sentiments. His socialist principles led to political engagements that resulted in exile from his country, Liberia.

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Today he runs an advocacy NGO but is acutely aware of the constraints that donors impose on his own activities: You know somebody like myself, what I am doing in my NGO. It’s not an agenda of my own per se. We are working in the NGO business. You call for what is marketable. What is in there that donors are prepared to fund? So that is the reality and the donors are not going to fund what you want. We can put some nuances here and there but essentially that is what I am talking about. Chris echoes others in denouncing a lack of ‘real ideological alternatives’, contrasting the period of his youth with a contemporary consensus that ‘capitalism is the only way’. For Chris this relates to a wider ‘identity crisis’ felt by those of a similar socialist disposition: How do we who question the dominant development paradigm which is driving globalization, the corporate economy, the corporate interest, that is driving globalization? How do we articulate the alternative? How do we call it?. You see, we are afraid to call it socialist because we can’t do that, you see, because it is not safe to call ourselves a socialist. So we call ourselves civil society, you see! Chris articulates a wider tension expressed by a range of former activists. Confronted by a lack of ideological alternatives and by an institutional landscape configured in relation to donor interests, they nonetheless embrace these institutional spaces and seek to make them work for their own ideological ends. The ‘compromise’ is keenly felt but is understood to be preferable to the alternative of an ideologically purist inactivity. Many of those prominent in the progressive movement of the early 1980s now work as senior employees of international NGOs. Others have found employment as consultants for international donors. Sulley (Box 5.1) works as a project officer for an international NGO. Although he sees continuity between the broadly progressive aims of this organization and the socialist principles that led him to political activism, he also recognizes the compromise this position entails: In a way [the international NGO] is part of the problem. It’s part of the problem but part of the solution. Part of the problem in the sense it is genuinely, genuinely trying to grapple with the problem of how to empower people to participate in their own development [ ... ];

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part of the problem in the sense that to a large extent the agenda is still set in the West. Others are less ambivalent, pointing to the ‘ideological corruption’ that has set in as a result of donor funding. In a particularly forthright attack, Mawuli contrasts his own work for the ‘anti-imperialist’ advocacy NGO he helped set up, with the selfishly instrumental orientation of certain Leftist activists. He illustrates his point through a hypothetical scenario: If I put myself in a consultant’s role, they pay me money, I give them information which they process into strategies for dealing with Ghana, and I am doing that for personal gain – I am not putting it into an organization, I just get a fat fee which I put in my bank account. I have to ask the question of how me making my personal survival is contributing to the bigger processes that I am against. [ ... ] A lot of Left people are into this kind of personal and organizational consultancies which is a grey area – a lot of them. I am not but if you go and ask [international donors] and find out how many of these Left people are there in a consultant role making thousands of pounds a month – and this is personal money ... I think it’s very difficult to find out how anybody who becomes a permanent consultant for [an international donor] who is Ghanaian can say they are contributing to building a social movement and rebuilding the balance of social forces to challenge the fundamental role of the government. It would be difficult to justify that. From a leftwing radical activist perspective, you have to give an explanation. For Mawuli, ‘ideological corruption’ also arises from the exploitation of the NGO movement by those on the Left: The involvement of the World Bank also meant that the NGO now became a vibrant sector of career opportunities – they paid fat amounts of money to do ridiculous things. [ ... ] A lot of people are coming into the NGO movement pretending to be politically engaged but only in it for material gain. So that process means that the NGO movement has lost its charitable status [ ... ] . So there is a large part of the NGO movement which is just opportunistic nonsense. You can look through the activists of the early 80s. You can find a lot of them involved in the NGO movement as an opportunity for career movement. People from our stage who are also being

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the most corrupt. They are the smartest ones and therefore also the most corrupt Following the return to multi-party democracy, NGOs created an institutional space in which previously covert dissent could be openly expressed. Former activists relate the comparative ‘safety’ of these organizations to their overtly ‘non-governmental’ aspirations. Lucas (Box 1.2) explains his own movement into the NGO sphere as part of a wider movement by those who were forced into exile or ‘underground’ during the late 1980s: If you don’t want to work in government but still want to have the opportunity to engage government and at the same time you are not in a position to launch an overtly political movement, the NGO world becomes very safe ground to operate from [ ... ] . It’s safe because you do not have overtly political goals. What politicians are worried about is when you are contesting for their power. But in this case we are not contesting for power, we are contesting for ideas. So though we might differ radically, you are not a movement or party that is aiming at power. So it allows you to propagate your ideas, engage government, talk freely, without being accused of having political ends. Being able to have influence on government is precisely a condition of being independent from the party-political process. The possibility of political influence is predicated on the condition of autonomy from ‘politics’. NGOs are therefore seen to allow relief from the ‘forced retreat’ of the late 1980s. In private, if not in public, former activists regard NGOs as a strategic and short-term means to a set of longer-term ideological ends. Lucas (Box 1.2) aspires to a situation in which he and others of a similar ideological persuasion can gain political power, but acknowledges the difficulties of doing so in the institutional climate that developed following election of the economically liberal Kufour government in 2001: To become a member of parliament you must pay a sort of gatefee. You see, money politics. [ ... ] So until the rules of the game are changed to allow for less wealthy people, [ ... ] until these rules change and the political attitude changes, you see, people like me don’t stand a chance of launching a political party in this country. I simply cannot martial the kind of money that these people have. The rules of the game are not in my favour. So in this situation you have to be

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realistic and recognize that you have to build your own personal profile including getting your wealth profile – getting your own house to live in so that you are free and independent, getting your kids good schools, getting the means by which you can cross the country, a good car where you can move and meet people and talk and tell people your view and why you want to be president. You must have the means to reach people. And the only way that you can do that is to build a certain layer of wealth, let me put it that way, for yourself. [ ... ] So in that sense there are compromises, trade-offs more or less that you have to make between your personal convictions and the realities around you within which you must operate. It’s more or less an adaptability issue. It’s about adapting to a current political environment. For Lucas, NGOs enable personal material accumulation that can be used to pursue a broader social vision. While they will not in themselves lead to that vision, they provide a strategic way of moving towards it. These ideas find broader resonance. Simon (Box 1.3) was a prominent member of a number of progressive organizations during the 1980s, including the JFM and NUGS and was also active in the Young Catholic Movement. In the mid 1980s, he was the co-founder of a national development NGO that has subsequently become one of the country’s largest advocacy NGOs. Although explicitly recognizing the limits of such organizations, he explains his continued involvement with this organization in terms of the current political situation: I think it would be clear to us that political parties as they are currently constituted are not necessarily the appropriate vehicle, for now, to articulate, you know, working people or poor people’s interest. Because they don’t project political agendas, they project personality and other social cleavages. So really in terms of political agenda there is no difference between the NDC [National Democratic Congress]13 and the NPP [New Patriotic Party]:14 they are exactly the same IFI [International Financial Institutions] driven programmes. So the only difference is the dominance of the ethnic position of the individuals in those two parties, nothing else, realistically. So it is clear that anybody who is actually interested in social change does not necessarily spend their time now in political parties. In the long-term, however, Simon (Box 1.3) describes the impossibility of achieving the kind of social change he hopes for by means of civil society

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advocacy. For him, as for other former activists, this creates a pressing dilemma: How long you can stay disengaged from the political party mechanism? Because the reality is that you cannot really change and shape government outside of the political party system. For Simon, the role of NGOs is to create the institutional and ideological terrain on which a new political future can be built: People don’t elect and vote for policy; they vote for other reasons. That can only be changed through a long-term opinion perception change: awareness and so on and so forth. That’s the only justification why many political activists stay outside of the political party system – hoping to play a role in influencing and shaping in a progressive way the public opinion, which would shift their role many years down the line in making choices. Other former activists attempt to politically engage in these ideologically and institutionally hostile circumstances by combining their work in the NGO sector with more overtly political activities. Sulley (Box 5.1) works as a programme director for one of the country’s leading international NGOs. While he sees this work as an important means to tackle some of the profound inequalities the country faces, he recognizes that for ‘real development’ a more profound political shift has to take place: Politically, I am a member of [ ... ] a small party. There are a group of us who think that there are forces to kind of shape the direction of the party that’s in power. Not like one of the big ones that is controlled by the money bags but that we can really use that party to kind of influence the debate in the country. So you can see that from time to time the presidential candidate comes up with positions, you know, that kind of steer controversy or discussion or debate – I think that’s what we are really looking at. Not [ ... ] as a party that is going to win the elections but one that we can use as a forum for discussion, bringing up issues, a vehicle for projecting our views. For Sulley, as for other former activists, NGOs present temporary and strategic possibilities that are part of a longer-term hope for a

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future whose ideological origins are located in the activism of their pasts. The ‘non-governmental’ position of NGOs provides a position from which activists shape the political terrain, not simply to accommodate international donor aspirations for ‘good governance’ and stronger ‘civil society’, but more profoundly in the hope of sowing the seeds for a different kind of government. Activists acknowledge that the legitimacy of NGOs rests on the occupation of a political space outside of governmental politics. Although they understand that such organizations cannot themselves aspire to government, many see them as vehicles to reconfigure the terrain on which party politics are fought.

Persistent pasts Activists’ descriptions of the contemporary NGO sector highlight the continued importance of these histories of social and political activism as explanations of present ideological orientations. NGO workers invoke this past, in accounting for contemporary alliances and factions between different kinds of contemporary NGO. This shared history of activist engagement is at times presented as a source of ideological coherence and shared identity. While many of the country’s leading NGOs were set up by people who participated in this loosely defined ‘progressive’ movement, the contemporary NGO sector is comprised of a diverse and growing range of organizations. At a general level, NGO workers contrast those NGOs with their roots in the progressive movements of the early 1980s with a range of ‘proliberal’ organizations that have emerged more recently – particularly since 2001 under the economically liberal Kufour government. This past is also understood to give rise to a set of personal relationships and networks that remain important. Samuel explains how friendships originating from the activism of his past can be of strategic significance in furthering the aims of contemporary NGOs: Those connections, those networks are very important. We identify our allies, we identify our enemies. How do you work on your enemies to turn them into your allies? You need to develop that kind of strategy. If the past can be a source of connections and networks, it also accounts for ongoing enmities, tensions and disagreements. Mawuli relates how

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the ideological disputes that took place in the 1980s continue to manifest themselves in the transformed context of the contemporary NGO sector: Unless the reasons for political differentiation were just conjunctural or contextual, if they have some deeper line in people’s political formations and make-ups then they will continue to express themselves and until those issues have been fully expressed and challenged they will emerge and re-emerge no matter what the context. So even in the NGO movement the political fault-lines that appeared in the political fallout are still very vital. Accordingly, while this history gives rise to a shared sense of identity, it does not produce a coherent community: Even though we have all built associations from our earlier political engagement which is still relevant and we still benefit from it, I don’t think the mistake should be made that somehow we have got a safe community because we don’t have. They were associations formed out of politics and the political fallouts are much more significant. And the differences of political approaches which informed our style are still evident in the differences of work even in the NGO movement. Mawuli relates the explicitly ‘political’ orientation of the advocacy NGO he co-directs to the political activism of his youth: ‘Our work is policy which is the most political end. [ ... ] We called ourselves antiimperialist progressive movements. Anti-imperialism is not that different from anti-globalization.’ By the same token NGO workers note how a historical tension between Young Catholics and members of socialist progressive movements re-emerges in the orientation of NGOs they have set up and worked for. While Catholics have tended to focus on the less politically sensitive area of ‘service delivery’, political activists have moved into advocacy. Personal, institutional and ideological connections in the present are therefore often explained on the basis of continuity with the past. By the same token, ideological fissions in the past are seen to give rise to disagreements within and between particular contemporary NGOs. The process of fission and fusion by which NGOs have split apart and re-formed is explained as a matter of the working out of these underlying tensions. Understandings of the past therefore remain central to the ways in which relations are defined, understood and negotiated in the

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context of the contemporary practices of NGOs (a theme developed in Chapter 3).

Conclusion As NGOs have proliferated, so has the academic literature pertaining to them. Despite very significant ideological differences, debates about the role of NGOs have tended to assume the centrality of global processes and institutions in driving the changes that have taken place. Advocates have highlighted the capacity for NGOs to spread a more ‘progressive’ set of values including greater accountability and improved democracy through the expansion of ‘civil society’ (e.g. Gyimah-Boadi 1996, Harbeson 1994).15 By contrast, detractors have highlighted the role of NGOs in consolidating Western hegemony and have pointed to their role in upholding neo-colonial forms of dependency (e.g. Manji and O’Coill 2002, Mawdsley et al. 2002).16 Whether for good or for bad the expansion of NGOs has often been understood as part of a process of the ‘globalization’ of Western political and economic values. While it is certainly true that donor policies have created new forms of institutional and discursive possibility, the foregoing account suggests that it is problematic to link the global expansion of the NGO sector to the globalization of any given set of ideologies (see also Keck and Sikkink 1998, Appadurai 2002). For related reasons, my account also challenges the idea that NGOs can simply be understood as a mechanism of Western imperialism and control (con. Manji and O’Coill 2002, Mawdsley et al. 2002). In Ghana, a rapid increase in the number and size of NGOs has been partly enabled by the funding associated with a broadly neo-liberal set of donor policies. As Ghanaian activists themselves acknowledge, this imposes certain constraints on the kinds of activities they can undertake. Yet NGOs should not be conflated with the policies that have promoted them. As subsequent chapters elaborate, these institutions are sustained by people with heterogeneous ideologies, often directly at a tangent to the people who fund them. This history therefore calls into question the attribution of an unwarranted coherence to the neo-liberal project (cf. Ong 2006). NGO workers in Ghana connect their particular ideological and political struggles to wider policies and discourses because doing so is a route to increased influence and financial support. While contemporary NGOs are therefore often obliged to present their arguments in globally recognizable forms, this does not mean that their ideologies and practices are reducible to the logic of global capitalism.

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In attempting to further particular ideological and political projects, actors make strategic use of whatever institutional and discursive spaces appear. For the ‘pioneers’ of the Ghanaian NGO movement, NGOs are understood as one – in many ways limited – means to the ends of the kinds of social transformations that they seek. As such they distinguish the possibilities they present from the broader ideological project of the various donors that have encouraged their expansion. Although these activists express despair at the existing state of affairs, they are sustained by wider ideological vision. It is these visions that prompt them to engage NGOs as a practical means to the kinds of future they hope for; and it is this hope that prompts them to question the legitimacy of these institutional spaces, even as they depend upon them. Focusing on the life histories of NGO activists, the following chapter elaborates on the forms this hope takes, and the ‘commitments’ and ‘sacrifices’ this gives rise to.

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2 Development in Person

Lives and histories The 2003 annual board meeting of the Centre for Human Development (CHD), one of the largest Ghanaian NGOs, is held in a newly built hotel in Kumasi, where over an elaborate buffet I sit with a number of the board members. Most have known one another for a number of decades, their friendships originating in university, and the social activism of their youth. Charles (Box 4.1) comments on the excessively lavish hotel and jokes that the air conditioning is making him cold. The group starts to reflect on the changes that have taken place in the country since the early 1980s when the organization was set up: ‘We’ve really been through a lot in this country’, one remarks, a reference to the political upheavals of the past two decades. Others in the group warm to the theme, reminiscing about the days when they started out: ‘We used to travel on the back of shea nut trucks just to get around,’ recalls one. ‘We’d be queuing up just to catch a ride on an articulator – there weren’t even trotros back then!’1 Another recollects how he used to take his typewriter around with him: ‘It wasn’t like this,’ he pronounces, casting his eyes around the grand hotel dining room. ‘We’ve come a long way.’ Throughout the conversation, the maturity of Ghana, the nation, resonates with talk about their own coming of age. The very existence of the hotel seems to literalize the political and economic progress of the country, just as their presence there demonstrates their success as individuals. The hotel stands as a demonstration of personal and national development. Yet the progress of their lives and the progress of nation are not seen as simple synonyms. In this, as in other contexts, NGO workers explicitly imagine national development to have taken place 45

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as a result of their own ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’ as NGO workers and activists. Building on the previous chapter, this chapter explores these related ideas as they appear in the life histories of a range of NGO workers. It focuses on the self-identification of NGO workers as ‘activists’, examining the distinctive ideological beliefs that underpin this identity, and the forms of personal ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’ that this gives rise to. By contrast to social scientists who have taken the definition of activism as an analytic problem (Alleyne 2002, Keck and Sikkink 1998), my account explores the ways in which different people understand what it means to be an activist. This is less to do with the normative definition of particular organizational forms, and more to do with a particular kind of orientation towards the world (cf. Andrews 1991).2 Since informants did not themselves agree on the nature of this orientation, the identity of ‘activist’ was in practice fluid and was at times contested. Werbner (2004) notes that a general ‘Afro-pessimism’ in the literature on African elites focuses attention on the apparently irrational acts of kleptomaniacs and self-serving bureaucrats, foreclosing understanding of African concerns for the public good. Against this, he suggests that ‘the way forward for public anthropology in post-colonial Africa is through ... biographical ethnography, illuminating the study of public man and the forum as process’ (2004: 10). Extending this approach, this chapter foregrounds the self-evaluations and individual choices that Ghanaian development workers privilege in relation to the wider discursive and moral frameworks through which their accounts are narrated. My intention is not so much to extend ‘agency’ to this group of actors, as to recognize how agency is located in their own understandings of the lives they have lived. In keeping with my broader approach, my concern is not to assess the truth or validity of these narratives but rather to understand why people represent themselves in these ways, and why they emphasize the ideas they do (Kaufman 1997). To follow Alleyne (2002: 125), this means asking: to what kind of question or concern could these life histories be an answer? Although there is not one answer to this question, these narratives shed light on the multiple, yet mutually implicated, ways in which ‘development’ inspires commitment.

Life history as performance Ghanaian development workers regard personal histories to be significant in a variety of contexts. During NGO workshops, important

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delegates are introduced through narratives that weave together biographical details and achievements. Descriptions of details such as the places people have travelled, the organizations to which they have been affiliated, their education and the projects they have undertaken do not simply provide information about their professional and technical competencies but also, implicitly, about their personal and moral outlook. In conferences and workshops, biographical details allow delegates to place others in relation to themselves and the broader ideological and institutional landscape. Such narratives also act to confer status, elucidating the wider social and organizational networks to which various development workers belong. Implicitly, connections to specific organizations also enable delegates to infer information about ideological and political outlook. The evocation of various organizations and activities thereby creates the subject as a node in a wider network of people and places. The private discussion of biographical information is also common, most notably during the various social events that accompany workshops and conferences. Such conversations are valued for their capacity to reveal aspects of people’s true ‘self’: NGO workers discuss their own and others’ pasts in order to shed light on who they are in the present. Political affiliations, for example, may be telling of the ‘real’ nature of people’s beliefs and are regarded as a gauge of ‘underlying’ motivations. In talking about their own and others’ lives, NGO workers draw out common themes and motivations, linking otherwise disparate organizations, ideas and events in narratives that are made to cohere. These are both premised upon and reproduce the idea of a particular kind of ‘self’: the structure of the life history with a beginning, middle and end simultaneously acts to delimit the parameters of the individual as it does the parameters of the narrative.3 While the testimonies I explore arose through interviews in which I constituted the immediate audience, they were narrated in the knowledge they would be written down and hence with a wider public in mind (cf. Miescher 2001). This interaction between interviewer and interviewee is also complicated by the relationship of these interviews to previous narrative events. Activists’ accounts assemble anecdotes and stories that have been told (or heard) in other contexts, even as these are improvised and embellished in relation to specific questions. Answers seem to flow automatically, reproducing a memory of a previously narrated memory, rather than the memory ‘itself’ (see Parry 2004: 285). The narration of a personal past is a socially significant act that lends

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the narrative a degree of stability. Although each narrative performance is fluid and emergent, framed by specific questions and contexts, there is a discernable internal logic and a sequence of stages that can be grasped (Barber 1991: 6–8).4 Life histories therefore have ‘performative’ (Ebron 2002: 1–16) aspects. The evocation of personal history is intended to do things in the present. Personal histories are not simple renderings of a past. Claims and identities are evinced not simply through what is said but also how it is said. As has been widely noted by other scholars (Ebron 2002, Hasty 2005, Piot 1999, Yankah 1998), rhetorical skill is an important aspect in the consolidation of status and identity in a variety of West African contexts. As ‘Big Men’ (or Women), of the NGO sector, knowledge of a variety of scholarly and development related discourses was demonstrated as much as asserted through linguistic competence.

Driven by history Kwesi is the regional coordinator of Global South Network, a high-profile international NGO advocating on issues relating to democracy, globalization and civil rights. We are talking in his office, a large room in a smart new building situated in the leafy Accra suburb of East Legon. On the wall there is a whiteboard, outlining strategies for a forthcoming campaign – hastily written adjectives connected in a mesh of overlapping arrows. I start by asking about the things that led him to the kind of work he does today. He pauses to reflect before telling me about the contrasting backgrounds of his parents: My father went to England and trained as an accountant. You know, he was given a scholarship as part of the colonial transition. And he came back and became a public servant. And after that he worked as a kind of business person. He was a kind of comfortable middle-class person. So there was this interesting duality in the way that I grew up: between my mother’s single room in her father’s house, and we kind of slept in front of the fire, and my father’s nice house in North Labone where he had this fleet of cars and so on. The contrasting circumstances of his separated parents led to a sense of ‘living in two worlds’, which in turn generated consciousness of wider social and economic inequality. While life in his father’s house in a wealthy Accra suburb gave him ‘a profound sense of the tyranny of

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wealth’, his mother’s outlook contributed more directly to the formation of his own ideas: She was a very active person, not in the kind of political way that I was but hers was rooted in the community and church ... I mean when I look at some of my own things, although ideologically we disagreed, the fact about equity and kindness and worrying about other people that was something we shared. Childhood experiences are therefore understood as the origin point of a ‘basic consciousness’ that underpins later activities. Subsequent involvement in student politics arises out of this consciousness, but in turn ‘shapes’ and ‘defines’ it. Kwesi describes the importance of exposure to a variety of ideologies in terms of their subsequent impact: Left ideologies, Marxism, revival of communist ideas, that was the diet on which we were brought up on the campuses. There were some lecturers on campus who were very, very radical. You know, when they had debates on campus, the halls were filled. Religion was quite absent in those days, it was a very materialist, philosophical, you know, talking about the nation’s future. People were into great themes and, you know, great ideas. Marxist and communist ideas are seen as ‘influences’ that originate in a particular historic moment, but explain future activities and decisions. Consciousness of social inequality leads to a commitment to social change that in turn justifies a range of subsequent decisions. Dissatisfied with his legal studies in Ghana he chose to start a PhD in Warwick that he hoped would lead to a more ‘engaged’ way of life: There were some very well-known [...] Marxist legal theorists in Warwick seriously discussing law in development and then also in theoretical terms in a kind of Marxist paradigm. I wanted to kind of move away from this being clever with rules and interpretation. I didn’t want to be a barrister. I wanted to come back to teach, to be an activist and maybe occasionally to practise. A similar desire for ‘political engagement’ later informed his decision to suspend the PhD in order to involve himself in political activism following the 1981 coup that brought Rawlings to power: ‘I decided I was going to take part in what was unfolding, much to the chagrin

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of my parents, supervisors and family members who all thought I was mad.’ He went on to reconnect with political allies forged through student politics, leading to involvement in the socialist New Democratic Movement (NDM), and later to work as part of the Workers’ Movement in Tema. Through these activities he developed a good reputation and friends in high places. Later he was appointed as an economic adviser to the government. Then in 1984 he resigned following ‘ideological disagreements’. For Kwesi the decision to work against the government as a ‘freelance activist’ arises from ‘commitment’ to an underlying set of beliefs that in turn necessitate ‘sacrifice’ in his own way of life. He describes the difficulties he and other activist friends faced during this period, undertaking covert activities for which they received no pay and risked their own lives. Many were beaten, harassed and threatened. Kwesi spent time in prison but considers himself lucky. Others were killed. By 1989, it had become apparent that such activities were largely futile in the political climate of the time. Following time in prison, he made the decision to return to his PhD: I had a degree I hadn’t finished. I kind of gambled it for a major political undertaking which hit the wall. And I felt a personal need to fulfil that, to feel fulfilled. And of course being a good student had always been part of me – I didn’t realize how important it was for me to feel successful – that I hadn’t failed. The ‘sacrifice’ of involvement in activism gives way to a more ‘personal’ set of motives and aspirations, and to the fulfilment of a different aspect of his ‘self’. Nonetheless, involvement in activism continued. He attempted to put pressure on the Rawlings government by writing and talking about the situation in Ghana, and becoming involved in wider anti-racist causes. The fact that these were ‘not terribly influential’ and the related feeling of being marginalized from Ghanaian politics led to increasing personal dissatisfaction: I finished my PhD. I didn’t want to stay a day longer. I’ve invested a lot of my intellectual and emotional energies in the politics of this country [Ghana] and it had related costs. Quite frankly, you know, in the UK the most satisfaction I could get as a black person would be in solidarity work, activists’ work and so on. And I didn’t think with the experience that I had been through I would be satisfied with an

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essentially fairly marginal and largely frustrating existence. I wanted to come back here and pick up those threads. In 1994, he returned to Ghana to help set up the NGO he now directs. Reflecting on his present situation, he presents his own predicament as part of a wider frustration felt by those who were engaged in left-wing political activism during the 1980s. The destruction of these movements, he suggests, resulted in ‘ideological disorientation’, while an increasingly right-wing political environment made it harder to operate. In this context he describes the ‘compromise’ entailed in working for an NGO; although they ‘cannot change the world’, they can contribute in more concrete ways to ‘the progress of particular sectors of society’. While NGOs represent a political compromise, they also enable personal reconciliation of different aspects of the self: ‘For me this is a nice balance between working, being an activist and being an intellectual.’

Self-narration Although the specificities of this particular life history are unique, they are yielded in terms of more general narrative strategies. Kwesi’s story takes the form of a series of anecdotes and observations in which other people, things and ideas are cited as ‘influences’. In elucidating the contribution of such influences to the course that his life has taken, the influences are abstracted from the ‘consciousness’ that results. In other words, stories and anecdotes illuminate the steps through which a distinctive ‘self’ develops but are not reducible to it. Events and relationships with particular people are construed as the more tangible, though more transient, counterpart to the less tangible, more enduring ‘ideology’ that arises. Such stories also act to delimit a self through the relation of discrete episodes into overarching themes. Kwesi’s narrative takes the form of a series of events and activities that appear as consecutive revelations, each examined in terms of the light they shed on the kind of person he is today. Although this person is composed of ‘different aspects’ which may be contradictory and in tension, their resolution remains an explicit personal and ideological aim. The desire for a coherent self (Linde 1993, Summerfield 2004) has its counterpart in the coherence of the narrative itself. In this way, new stories are related to existing themes. The importance of social equity is introduced at the start in relation to the disparate social worlds occupied by his parents, a concern that is later cited as the rationale for

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subsequent decisions. In this narrative, as in others, the sequence in which events are related is therefore crucial in terms of the establishment of causality and motivation. Where events are construed as points of successive revelation about the ‘self’, lives are temporalized in terms of development and progress.5 Kwesi tells his own life in relation to, and at times defined by, a series of political events. For him, both ‘history’ and ‘politics’ are seen as forces with which he variously ‘connects’ and ‘disconnects’. While history is an external agent that shapes the path his own life has taken, he also sees himself as a historical actor, whose actions have shaped the path of history. In this, as in other activist narratives, historical events of national importance are thus identified as moments of ‘personal’ importance. The development of the ‘self’ is identified with the development of the nation.

Origins Many activists locate the dawning of their ‘social consciousness’ in relation to particular moments of ‘epiphany’ (Denzin 1989: 22–25, Alleyne 2002: chapter 5). Involvement in activism is said to emerge from a particular moment or incident, which coheres a wider set of understandings concerning the nature of society and their role within it. In particular, the dawning of an activist consciousness is often located in relation to key moments in which individuals become aware of social inequalities and contradictions. This awareness is then seen to motivate the quest for ideological frameworks that make sense of these difficulties, and a search for practical means by which to enact these. James (Box 6.1) now works as a development consultant, having previously worked for a range of national NGOs. He recognizes that the work is well paid, but claims that his educational qualifications – he has a PhD – would allow him to earn more elsewhere. I ask why he doesn’t and he starts to describe the dawning of his ‘social conscience’ in the circumstances of his childhood. His father was a district commissioner following Independence. He grew up living in a large compound house and attending Achimota, one of the country’s elite boarding schools. By contrast to the commitment professed by other activists, James describes his own ‘laziness’ and ‘self-interest’. At school he ‘did the minimum to get by’. Later he chose to take architecture at university simply on the grounds that this would afford him a comfortable lifestyle: ‘I was never really interested in designing buildings, I was really only interested in making a good income with a minimal effort.’ This ‘lazy’ and ‘selfish’

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attitude was radically transformed through an encounter at university with one of the Pentecostal churches: I really started wondering what was life really about. And a friend of mine, a classmate was attending a prayer meeting that evening and he invited me. So for want of anything better to do, I just joined him and we went. And basically my life got transformed that night. You know, I used to be a person who was very lazy, very selfish, who was only interested in making money, but that night I had an experience. And basically I gave my life over to Jesus Christ. It was a huge change for me, you know, it changed my whole thinking, my whole perception of myself, my whole interest in life. When I entered [university] I had a particular agenda, but now, suddenly my whole agenda was changing because of what I’d experienced in one night. In a narrative form commonly enlisted in Pentecostal religions (Gifford 1998, Martin 2002), conversion is imagined as a radical turning point in life. Moral emptiness prior to conversion is contrasted with the fulfilment and direction found through the teachings of Christ. Commitment is imagined to emanate from an external force that is discovered and embodied. His decision to become involved in the NGO movement, work through which he would be able to help others and contribute to a better society, came not from his background but from the teachings of Christ. Others describe how their work in development came about through a more gradual process of evolution. Now in her mid 40s, Emily (Box 2.1) combines work as a political activist and as an NGO worker. We meet one afternoon in a restaurant popular with development workers and government elites. As we sit drinking cola under a shady mango tree, she tells me about the experiences that led her to the kinds of things she does today. In particular, she sees precedents for her later political work in her ‘anti-authoritarian’ attitude towards school. At the Catholic school you couldn’t question. I came from a background where I was questioning a lot. I remember right from home I questioned a lot – my sister always beat me up for asking too many questions. So many times I was called to meet with sister superior for being disobedient, but I would not accept the status quo. This reluctance to accept authority presaged her later work as a political activist. Later she describes how involvement with various socialist

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Box 2.1 Emily I was born and brought up in Accra. My father was a chartered accountant and my mother was a baker. But although they were relatively wealthy, they always believed in equality and social equity. As children, we were always treated as equals with the house-helps and those people that my mother employed at the bakery. This ideology of equality really helped to shape my outlook. I attended Saint Mary’s Secondary School, a Catholic school with very strict rules, but I would not accept the status quo; I was always challenging authority. I always had a social conscience which maybe came from my parents but was also just something that I’d always had inside me from the moment I was born. But it wasn’t until I went to sixth form where I got involved in student politics and that was when my ideas really started to take shape. At university I read Land Economy. Actually I thought I wanted to have a career and make big bucks, but my National Service changed all that. I was posted to a very rural village which was totally different from anything I’d known – real poverty. And that experience really led me to rethink my priorities. So after my year of compulsory National Service, I decided that I would sacrifice the big bucks and do something that was more about working for humanity. Actually, three years of my life were given out free. Over that time I came in contact with massive social inequality and that drove me to question how these things came about: what was it that made certain parts of Ghana more developed than other parts? What was it that made me sit in Accra and live a comfortable life when people I saw in the communities could not eat well, could not sleep well, could not send their children to school – what was it? More and more in the pit of my stomach I felt uncomfortable and that the system was unfair. How would you make it right? This search for social justice led me to apply for a job at the NGO CHD, where I became the education officer. Basically it was setting up development clubs in schools and organizing public forums to screen and discuss development related films. In lots of ways that was rewarding, but I began to see that NGOs address the symptoms rather than the causes of social problems. What I also saw is that many NGO workers are more interested in their own careers than changing society. It was those things that made me want to enter politics. So I got involved in various activities and a couple of years ago I contested a seat as a member of the socialist Reform Party.6 Unfortunately the campaign was unsuccessful but I’m hoping for the best the next time round! At the moment I’m working as a development consultant. I do find that practically rewarding but really it’s a way to support myself, keep my political work going and also to pursue other things that I believe in. At the moment I’m also in the process of setting up an NGO, which I hope will be another practical way of trying to realize my social ideals.

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organizations made her aware of the ideas and beliefs that she already held. Activism did not come from the experience of a set of events, or even from exposure to new ideas. Her beliefs were always there, even before she was conscious of them as such: Later on I got to know that I was on the Left and had socialist inclinations. For me it was about equity, about social justice, about processes through which resources can be distributed and everybody benefits no matter what your social status is. But at that early age I didn’t know of any of the political philosophies – but I knew what burnt in me. At university she decided not to get involved in student politics because of the antagonism that existed between the students and the government at the time and the corresponding danger of persecution. Yet respite from ‘all the hustle of politics’ was short lived and she was soon drawn back to activism. She describes this ‘pull’ as the inevitable consequences of her own disposition: ‘You can never run away from it – if it burns in you, it burns in you. It’s all about social justice – you can never run away from it.’ Activism is not something to be consciously chosen, but a feeling that comes from ‘within’ – as an ‘innate’ disposition that she was born with. Her ‘politics’ existed even before these found formal expression. Many activists locate the dawning of their social consciousness in a conjunction of ‘life experience’ and exposure to particular kinds of ‘ideology’.7 For example, Mawuli (Chapter 1) relates his own radicalization to the circumstances of his upbringing: For me it was a search for solutions and the intellectual framework that provided the solutions was a revolutionary one ... My evolution was something like this: I saw myself going through education and getting a job to provide for the material demands of my parents. But I realized as I went on that whatever I did I would not get enough money to solve all the problems of my siblings, and even beyond that the whole village – unless I became Bill Gates, there was no way I was going to do that. And as I got to sixth form, there were various explanations of society. I remember the particular strain of philosophy that was particularly powerful in explaining the situation as I found it was the Marxist perspective.

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His ‘peasant’ upbringing made apparent social inequalities and problems, to which socialist and Marxist thinking provided solutions. Simon (Box 1.3) currently directs one of the country’s largest national NGOs, but also works as an academic and consultant in the United Kingdom. In a quiet corner of McDonald’s in London’s Victoria station, he echoes the accounts of others in describing the dawning of his own political radicalization in terms of a conjunction between ‘experience’ and ‘ideology’. He came from a poor village in the North of Ghana, where he experienced poverty and injustice that made him want to change things for the better. Yet if these experiences provided the impetus, then ‘radicalization’ itself came through contact with Catholic liberation theology: Two things shaped my own social perspective. One was very early, the struggle for a fair allocation of irrigated land in my village: between the owners of the land who were not compensated for it and the bureaucrats, rich merchants, military generals, who were then living in Bolgatanga, who had acquired the irrigated land. And that struggle [...] had very violent dimensions ... My personal experience starts from there, from my village people’s struggle for a fair distribution of irrigated land. Secondly, I was in secondary school [...] and there we started student politics. It was Paulo Freire ... it was basically a consciousness raising thing that you need to know that you have power and you need to ask questions about why things happen the way they do. And you need to understand that you can make a change. So it became a radicalizing ideology for many of us. Experience of ‘poverty’ in ‘the village’ is more widely imagined as a stimulus for engagement in activism, making visible social inequalities that are not apparent to those who came from towns. In such narratives, ‘poverty’ is a category with rhetorical force (Werbner 2004: 19), used to make evident personal integrity and commitment.8 By the same token, activists question the commitment of others, by highlighting their ‘elite’ backgrounds, or by disputing the reality of the ‘experiences’ that other people claimed. Those from ‘the village’ describe the ‘direct experience’ this gives them of poverty and social injustice. Florence (Box 2.2) is the regional director of international NGO advocating on various issues relating to gender. For much of her adult life she has lived in Accra, with extended periods abroad to undertake a PhD and a Master’s. Nonetheless she cites

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Box 2.2 Florence My father was a cocoa farmer but also did a bit of formal waged work as a cocoa receiver. Things were often financially difficult, but he was educated enough to recognize the value of education and was always keen to educate his children. I attended primary school in the village but went to the city for secondary school. Some of my elder brothers and sisters had already made it there – one was a university lecturer, one a secondary school teacher – and they supported us younger ones coming through. I think this time in the village was very formative in terms of the work I do today. If you are looking at the different classes in the village, you could place my father at the highest level. But in terms of the location, you could say that things were not so good. Through that I came to see social inequalities which shaped my thinking. Even though I don’t spend so much time there now it is still important, because you don’t have to be continually in the village to make a contribution. As somebody born in a rural area, that is my location, that is where I come from, that is my roots. I can never forget who I am. And therefore in my work I make sure that I articulate issues with that perspective in mind. And there is always a sense of where I am coming from in my discussion of the issues. My mother lives in the village and if your mother lives in the village, physically you have to go there from time to time. Mentally, the image of how life is there is always in your mind. But it was really at university that my outlook started to form and I started thinking more about all the problems of development the country was facing. I went to Legon, where I met my future husband. His views were really very strong on issues about development, issues about the black person in the global context. He was very much into left politics and that influenced me a lot. I was growing up and had all of these notions about marriage and all of that and then I met this guy whose attitude to everything was totally contrary to everything that I had known. And there was an attraction there because I was talking about wanting to do something other than just for money. I graduated in the early 1980s and began to work as a journalist. That was where my interest in NGO work evolved. I started to cover their activities, got interested in the issues and started to meet people. Through that I became a member of the board of the NGO CHD. Some people knew about me – they were my friends and they knew my ideas and they thought I could make a good contribution. That’s how I got into it and then I was meeting all these people from all these national NGOs which was really inspiring. While I was at the Graphic I did a Master’s in the Hague. That sharpened my interest in development. But I also became frustrated at the Western bias of the course. In particular, issues relating to women’s sexuality and the over-emphasis of the body. Also an over-emphasis on the individual rather than the society or the community. So that was also part of my inspiration. For a while now I’ve been the regional director of an international NGO advocating on various gender issues. Sometimes the work can be frustrating but it’s a good way of trying to put all of these ideas into practice.

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the enduring importance of her connection to ‘the village’, both at a personal level and as a source of ongoing professional inspiration: You don’t have to be continually in the village to make a contribution. As somebody born in a rural area, that is my location, that is where I am from, that is my roots. I can never forget who I am. That’s who I am. And therefore in my work I make sure I articulate issues with that perspective in mind. And there is always a sense of where I am coming from in my discussion of the issues. My mother lives in the village and if your mother lives in the village, physically you have to go there from time to time. Mentally, the image of how life is there is always in your mind. And if it is in your mind then you must be able to articulate it. For Florence, physical detachment is not akin to rupture but to a new and in some senses more profound form of engagement. This sense of detached engagement is echoed in her understanding of education as a force that paradoxically takes you away from these realities, while making it easier to understand them and therefore better able to act upon them. For Florence it is ‘all about reconnecting’. If physical rupture from the family and place that constitute ‘home’ can be emotionally difficult, it nonetheless sets the parameters for a productive form of engagement – not only with this place but with development problems more generally. Similar tensions are articulated by Chris (Box 5.3). Now in exile in Ghana as a result of political activities in his country of birth, Liberia, he is unable to visit his family ‘back home’. He locates the dawning of his ‘social conscience’ in relation to the poverty and inequality he experienced as a child, and cites the ongoing difficulties experienced by his family in Liberia as a source of motivation for his work as director of a leading advocacy NGO. For Chris this physical detachment has its counterpart in the detachment brought about through his own education: Emotionally, you’re still in touch with them. I think you have to put it this way: yes, by your education you are different. Because by being educated you’ve seen a lot, you’ve travelled. So I mean you are intellectually different and maybe culturally you are different. Your outlook is a bit different. I mean that your expectations in life are a bit different. That’s true. But I don’t think that my education has made me less interested to try to do something to do something about my roots. No, to the contrary it has equipped me to be able to transform the situation that I was born in.

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Paradoxically education creates a distance from his family that sets up new forms of relationship. Transformation is made possible by removal, not only from his own family but more generally from the kinds of social problems that ‘home’ represents. The sociologist Denzin (1989: chapter 1) suggests that the family is universally cited as the ‘zero-point’ of origin in life histories. Yet the narratives of Ghanaian activists often locate an origin point in much wider social units in which the family figures incidentally, if at all. Many of the older generation of activists describe how their radicalism originates in the social and economic inequalities they experienced when they were younger. Now in his 40s, Joseph (Box 3.1) works as a marketing manager for a multinational drinks company but remains a board member of the NGO the Centre for Human Development (CHD). As an active member of the Young Catholic Movement in the early 1980s, he helped set up an NGO with the intention of putting the ideas of liberation theology into practice. During the 1970s he was still at school but was ‘radicalized’ by his experience of the period and in particular the political and economic corruption of the time: I remember at secondary school I was trying to work out the social forces around me ... and I found that I did not have a framework within which to place the happenings of the times. Even though I thought there was something basically wrong, I did not know how to articulate it ... And here I was a young man sitting in the middle not knowing how to judge these big forces sweeping around me ... I just felt that there was something wrong somewhere and I didn’t really understand what. And I guess it was this search to understand what the issues really were – probably those are the forces that helped to drive me in a certain direction. More generally, the social, economic and political turmoil of 1970s is cited as a radicalizing influence on the older generation of activists. Older activists also locate their radicalization in the ‘ideological influences’ of the period. A former NDM member now working as a senior employee of an international NGO relates the ideological influences he derived from his time at the University of Legon in the early 1980s: It was a time when we had all been introduced to very exciting concepts. In those days, there was socialism and communism, which was all over campus. It was a new experience for people. It was all very new and a big inspiration to a lot of us. It was exciting and there

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were a lot of possibilities. It is not surprising that a lot of people were driven into social action. For him the lack of ideological alternatives of today’s ‘globalized society’ stands in stark contrast to the ‘radical thinking’ of the past. As in activists’ accounts more generally, past experiences are cited as the origin points of a distinctive outlook, characterized by ‘radicalism’, ‘ideology’ and the concomitant ‘commitments’ that these give rise to. Similarly, female activists sometimes locate radicalization in experiences of ‘gender inequality’. Patience (Box 2.3), directs a national NGO. She sees herself as an activist and explains how this orientation develops: When I was at school, as I started to realize what differences there were between men and women, I started to ask things like, why can my daddy go out and have other children when my mother is not allowed to; why is my father more educated than my mother? I began to see differences which raised simple but profound questions. Activists therefore locate their outlook in a range of different ways. What these narratives have in common is not a shared set of experiences or ideologies but the location of radicalization in the conjunction of ‘experience’ and ‘ideology’. At least in its prototypical form, ‘experience’ is understood to create awareness of particular social or political issues that are then developed in relation to different ‘ideological’ explanations.

Commitment Although the Marxist rhetoric of political organizations such as the June Fourth Movement (JFM) and NDM might seem a far cry from the more liberal NGO discourses of human rights and democracy, activists’ life histories often draw connections between these, presenting their work in the NGO sector as an extension or continuation of an earlier set of preoccupations (Chapter 1). At a personal level, activists highlight the ‘commitment’ that underscores engagement in ostensibly distinct kinds of activism. Such ideas appear throughout the account of Kwaku (Box 2.4), who currently directs an advocacy NGO for the protection of media freedom in West Africa. In narrating his life, he outlines how experiences in his past have contributed to the work he does today. He suggests that the kinds of covert tactics he was forced to use as a political activist contrasted with his current work within the NGO sector. Nonetheless

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Box 2.3 Patience I came from what you’d call a pretty elite, middle-class family. My father was a lawyer and my mother was a housewife. I grew up in Accra, where I attended primary school and then secondary school – that was to Mfantsipim Girls’ School, which is one of the elite schools in this country. Then in 1984 I went to the University of Ghana, where I read Law. During my degree, I became heavily involved in the activism that was going on then – I was part of all the sit-downs, the strikes and all the other things that were going on at the time. I was involved in student politics through the Student Representative Council and then I also had a lot of friends who were in the NDM and part of that general Leftist tendency. There was a certain political, ideological culture that came with involvement in those organizations and it was one I felt I belonged to. At the time, the law department had many radical Marxist lecturers which influenced my own thinking. Exposure to those ideas helped me to see how certain sections of society – in particular women – are often disadvantaged as a result of property issues. I began to question my upbringing: why was it OK for my father to behave in the way that he did towards my mother? Why did he work when she wasn’t able to? But even though I found those ideas useful, I would not say I was a Marxist. Other factors were also important in my developing social outlook. I trained in Law and that increased my awareness of social issues. And I began to see how the things I had seen in my family – gender disparities – were also true of society more widely. I began to realize that I wanted to devote my life to working against those kinds of things. After graduation I attended Law School and then subsequently went to work for the Attorney General. As part of my job I was often asked to represent women. Those cases made me see how issues of power and gender interact. However I had a number of difficult cases and those made the limitations of the law increasingly apparent to me. The law seemed to fail to protect the most vulnerable, particularly women, and I wanted to address some of these injustices more directly. I undertook an MA in Law at a prominent American university, and that led on to a placement for the NGO Human Rights Watch. When I returned to Ghana, I wanted to put all that experience into practice so I set up my own NGO to tackle human rights issues relating to gender. I’m an evangelical Christian and that also informs the work that we do here. Our foundational principles are biblical principles of love and mercy.

he sees continuity in terms of the pursuit of ‘freedom of speech’, ‘antirepression’ and ‘democracy’: My thinking hasn’t changed: it’s the same kind of thing that propels me to do what I do now. I’m focused on one area, but the general questions of change are still there – you know, poverty ... All the things that don’t make our society move forwards.

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Activists more generally invoke the idea of ‘commitment’ in suggesting that changes in the kinds of ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’ they pursued are underpinned by an ‘underlying ideology’. In narrating the various kinds of activities he has undertaken as a political activist and later as an NGO worker Mawuli (Chapter 1) highlights the underlying ‘commitments’ these arise from, explaining that the various causes and activities he has pursued in his adult life are underpinned by ‘some simple but profound problems’ arising from social inequality. Other former political activists suggest that a ‘toning down’ of the radical rhetoric of the early 1980s was a ‘strategic’ response to more recent political circumstances, as the right-wing ‘Busia politics’9 of the current Kufour government have changed the political terrain in which NGOs operate. Rudolf, a former member of the JFM, explains: ‘There are trade-offs between your personal convictions and the realities within which you must operate. It’s about adapting to a current political environment.’ Despite the current government’s increasing tolerance of criticism, he suggests that ‘left-wing agendas’ are harder to pursue where the ruling party is ideologically to the Right. Beyond particular ideological differences, the very fact of ‘commitment’ is said to give rise to a particular orientation that differentiates those whose beliefs are ‘genuine’, from those who were ‘morally bankrupt’ or ‘only in it for the money’. At times older NGO workers who engaged in activism during the 1980s imagine themselves (regardless of ideological persuasion) in contrast to a younger generation of NGO workers, who are more concerned with professional advancement and financial gain. At other times, older activists differentiate between those who have remained ‘committed’ and those who have ‘sold out’. ‘Commitment’ therefore acts to define a moral self, in which the singular pursuit of a particular ideological position, overrides considerations of personal welfare and material gain. Although being ‘committed’ is often taken to be synonymous with being ‘radical’, older activists sometimes differentiate their enduring commitment from their waning radicalism. Sulley (Box 5.1) became ‘radicalized’ during his time as a student at the University of Legon, shortly after Rawlings came to power. During the coup of 1981, he was president of the politically influential Student Representative Council, and took the decision to suspend university in order to allow students to help with the government’s attempts at economic reconstruction. Looking back, however, he describes the youthful naivety of their actions: ‘Our radicalism was fuelled to a large extent by the books we had read, the radical thinkers we had met. But coming back

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Box 2.4 Kwaku I’d say I’ve been an activist all my adult life, but over that time my activism has taken a lot of different forms. In 1971 I went to the United States to study journalism. It was there that my interest in activism really started to develop through all the social movements that were there on campus. One strand of this was support for the liberation of African colonial countries: Mozambique and Guinea Bissau at the time. Then there was also the civil rights movement. In 1979 I returned to Ghana, where I started lecturing in journalism. I got more interested in the political situation in Ghana and joined the NDM. After the coup of 1981 I was given a prominent public position. But later I fell out with Rawlings and had to resign for political reasons. And at the same time I was increasingly disillusioned with the direction that the government were taking. They had come to power with socialist principles that were largely abandoned and the regime was becoming increasingly oppressive. During the early 1990s a number of us started actively working against the regime, trying to open up the space for democracy. I was active in the Movement for Freedom and Justice. We came from a broad political spectrum, we didn’t agree on everything by any means, but were united in our sense that things had to change. Then after the elections in 1992, partly as a result of our efforts, the political situation opened up. In 1995 I set up an advocacy NGO campaigning on issues of media freedom. And at the same time, I’ve kept up my work as an academic and lecturer.

to the ground, we realized that things don’t just happen like that. It takes a lot of very incremental change to change society.’ Thus he contrasts his earlier radicalism with his more recent work as Programme Coordinator of an international NGO. While activities such as picketing the university ‘produced a lot of noise’, he suggests they had less social impact than the less overtly radical activities he now performs. Waning radicalism is seen as evidence of greater ‘commitment’ to the cause of ‘social justice’. For activists, ‘commitment’ to a particular way of life is anchored by a set of ‘ideological’ beliefs. In these narratives ‘commitment’ is made tangible and ‘real’ on the basis of its endurance over time (cf. Andrews 1991). Thus activists claim that those who abandoned their earlier beliefs were never ‘genuinely’ committed. Against this ideal, they speak of former colleagues ‘selling out’, citing their change of career or lifestyle as evidence that commitment was never ‘real’ in the first place. Against the ideal of commitment, activists assess their own and others actions. The concept therefore provides a shared moral framework, even as activists dispute the extent to which particular lives and particular acts may or may not conform to this ideal.

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Ideology Activists imagine their lives to be anchored by an unchanging set of ideas and values. However these do not have their origin in a canon of received thought. Rather activists borrow ‘pragmatically’ from different strands of philosophy. Ideas in this sense are a means to an end: their strategic effects are emphasized over and above an ‘academic’ interest. Describing how his work as an academic related to his work as an activist, Kwaku (Box 2.4) sees a complementary relationship between the two, suggesting that the ideas he writes about are put into practice through his NGO. However the motivating force for his human rights activism is not located at the level of ‘ideology’, but in his ‘direct experience’ of repression of rights and freedom of speech. He has ‘sympathy’ for Marxist thinking, but does not see this as an important determinant of his ‘underlying perspective’. The important thing is not the ‘ideology itself’ but the ends to which it is used. Thus, he suggests that ‘academic debate’ is futile in the context of his work as an activist: The kind of work we do, we rarely get involved in philosophical and ideological debates. A journalist is murdered in cold blood in Côte d’Ivoire, that’s what my work entails: to find out who did it and see what can be done. Now if anybody came to raise a philosophical question about that, I’d say they are crazy. Philosophical things should not be the basis for conflict among human rights organizations. The capacity to bring about change, he suggests, requires that conflict be minimized between different NGOs and activists. In so far as ‘philosophy’ and ‘idealism’ are a source of such conflict, they did not have a place in the context of activism. Andrews (1991: 145) describes something of the particular relationship between belief and action in the life histories of British Marxists, suggesting that these are characterized by an unusual degree of synchronicity. Actions are purposefully made to conform with beliefs, just as beliefs are seen to derive directly from experience of the world. Similarly, Ghanaian activists strive for consistency between their ‘ideas’ and their ‘actions’, and attempt to evince this consistency in the ways that they narrate their lives: ideas are said to inform the actions that people have taken, just as these actions are ideally motivated by a consistent set of ideas. In narrating his life, Emmanuel (Box 1.1) suggests that the political activism he engaged in during the early 1980s arose from his upbringing in the North and the social difficulties and inequalities he experienced growing up there. In 1978 he studied at the University of Ghana, Legon,

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where this sense was moulded by his exposure to a variety of intellectual currents that produced a desire to bring about ‘action’. However his subsequent political activism ultimately led to imprisonment and exile. If activism consists in the concerted attempt to practically realize ideological and political visions, then incarceration and exile both lead to intense frustration. Being ‘far removed from reality’, he was unable to translate his ideas into action. The result was a very tangible and personal sense of loss, along with a sense of ‘disorientation’. Throughout this period he remained personally unfulfilled. If a moral life therefore inheres in the alignment of ideology and action, a perceived disjunction between these can be cause for critical reflection. Emmanuel describes his decision to leave the JFM arising from the fact they were ‘too ideological’: ‘academic’ interest in various Marxist philosophies precluded ‘concerted action’. By the same token he justifies the decision to set up an NGO for Ghanaian refugees in the UK, suggesting that it allowed greater possibility for ‘real change’. Similarly more recent work as a development consultant is contrasted with the political activism of his youth: ‘Political rhetoric has some value but if it doesn’t make a difference to people’s lives then there’s no point.’ Berglund argues that ‘activism [is] a heightened awareness to the negotiability of human relationships’ (1998: 7). By extension, Ghanaian activists’ understandings of the relationship between ideology and action amount to a heightened perception of the negotiability of relationships latent within the world more generally. This capacity to see things not as they are but as they ought to be is regarded as a matter of ‘idealism’. As such, it is valued for the way in which it sustains ‘commitment’ and the desire to change things. At the same time ‘ideology’ becomes problematic as an end in itself. For activists a good life is one in which ideology sustains actions in the advancement of an underlying cause.

Sacrifice Intractable commitment to a particular perspective necessitates flexibility and compromise in other areas of life. Life-history narratives elucidate how commitment and idealism result in lives that do not take straightforward paths (cf. Alleyne 2002: chapter 6). Talking to me in his large, red pickup as we drive between meetings, Lucas (Box 1.2) suggests that ‘life is about struggle’, describing how his own attempts to bring about social change have led to ‘personal sacrifice’. A Catholic by upbringing, he recounts his radicalization during

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secondary school through membership of the Bishop Romero Youth for Development organization, and exposure to the teachings of liberation theology. These ideas laid the foundations for the political activism he later engaged in while a student. Initially he supported Rawlings but he left in 1982 citing the increasingly ‘neo-liberal’ direction of the Provisional National Defence Council government. After his resignation, he began working covertly against the government, forming ‘resistance cells’ and helping to found the United Revolutionary Front, a political organization campaigning for the return to democracy. As a result of these activities he suffered brutal treatment at the hands of various government agencies that harassed, beat and ultimately imprisoned him. Many other activists left the country during this period. By contrast he describes his own decision to stay: I just had this true conviction that all these ideals we’d been talking about – integrity ... They couldn’t come from outside [the country]. So somebody had to be here to be the link and that was why I was here. I was talking to all of [the other activists]. I suffered a lot for it but a lot of them salute me for that. Staying in the country compromised his safety and financial security, but was a necessary ‘sacrifice’ for the realization of his ideals. This idea of ‘sacrifice’ has wider currency among NGO workers, who elucidate their morality and commitment by reference to the possibilities for material gain they choose to forgo. Akua (Box 2.5) came into NGO work through journalism, where she developed interests in gender inequality that she wanted to address ‘practically’. After finishing her Master’s, she was offered a well-paid job at an international NGO but decided to take a relatively poorly paid job at a national NGO. When I was doing fieldwork for my Master’s, I did it in the community. There was this big international NGO working there [...] and they tried to poach me. At that time I was paying all my fees. I was sitting on a trotro with all this discomfort. I looked and saw women walking from the village and asked myself, ‘Which job do I want?’ And it was clear to me that it was [the national NGO] because it’s only there that I can empathize and reach [the poor]. ‘Ideological commitment’ is understood to entail ‘financial sacrifice’. Similarly Charles (Box 4.1) explains how he refused a job at an international NGO, choosing to work with a Ghanaian NGO on ‘ideological

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Akua

Whatever I have done is because of the environment in which I was born. My parents were both teachers and they taught me most of the values that I continue to believe in. I was brought up to believe in the human being, the person, and to value knowledge and learning above material wealth. As teachers they were not wealthy but they valued education so they sent me to Wesley Girls’ School, which is one of the best schools in Ghana. It’s got the reputation of being quite an elite school but my experience was that people came from many backgrounds. That taught me that it doesn’t matter where you come from: what counts is what’s in your head. Being a girl’s school, it also instilled a sense of the value of women, which is something that has become more important to me in my adult life. In 1985 I went to the University of Ghana to study Business Administration and that really developed my interest in social issues – lots of new people and new ideas. But I didn’t spend much time with those at the more political, more socialist end of the spectrum. A lot of them were more interested in being firebrands than dealing with issues. After graduating, I got a job at the Ghana News Agency, where I began writing on women’s issues. And it was really through that that I got involved in activism. And then also at the same time I was the national secretary for my church’s women’s fellowship. So I went to a lot of workshops and seminars where I came in contact with the world of NGOs. As I got more into that world my interest in development issues grew. I became increasingly frustrated with journalism. There was an attitude that women could only write about cakes and flowers. So it was partly frustration that led me to apply for a job at the research unit of a major national NGO CHD – which luckily I got. Over time I was promoted to deputy-director. But my relationship with the board was often difficult. They saw the NGO as an activist organization, but I felt they needed to be more involved in service delivery. It was partly that frustration that made me apply for this job – working as the country director for an international NGO focusing on children and human rights issues.

grounds’. The international NGO would have paid more but this was an insignificant consideration: ‘My objective for money is not to use it to have a good time. The important thing is what I use this for – for the common good of society; to bring happiness to others’. Money is not an end in itself, and is valued only in so far as it provides the means by which a set of ideals can be realized. As with ‘ideology’, activists value money in terms of its wider social effect. Money’s value derives from its capacity to advance a set of ideas and values. While a tension between moral commitment and material gain is sometimes registered by individuals, it is also expressed in generational terms. Older ‘NGO pioneers’ express fears that the younger generation

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are ‘only in it for the money’, highlighting a ‘lack of commitment’ among those who have not experienced the ‘hardships’ of their own youth. One former member of the JFM now working for a national NGO explains: ‘A lot of people are coming into the NGO movement pretending to be politically engaged but only in it for material gain’. Correspondingly ‘moral corruption’ sets in, as agendas and ideas are increasingly subordinated to money. Younger activists employ similar rhetorical strategies in criticizing those that come into NGO work through political activism. Akua worked for one of the national NGOs founded by a number of former Young Catholics. During her time there she started to suspect that some of their radicalism was a ‘charade’: ‘All of these radicals, I am yet to see one of them convince me that they are still radical. The bottom line is that what’s in practice is very different to all the theory they shout about’. She recounts an incident that illustrates this contradiction: One of these people from one of these German [donor] organizations walked in and cracked a joke that, well, the NGO CHD he knew was full of radical socialists who would wear rubber slippers and dress like they don’t give a damn. But for the past four years they are all consultants working with the same World Bank they said they didn’t want anything to do with – taking money from the World Bank, driving posh air-conditioned cars. And these people said, ‘No, we ride in trotros and don’t own our own cars.’ These people were my role models, I wanted to see them as perfect, but it’s the truth: most of them are consultants. Similarly she describes the time she was on a plane travelling back from a conference in Holland. Because the plane was empty she was upgraded to first class, only to find herself sitting next to a group of former political activists: ‘Is this what socialism is about?’ she asks rhetorically. In questioning the commitment of an earlier generation of activists, she does not question the idea of commitment as such. Rather their lack of commitment serves to highlight the commitment of a younger generation of women activists: When I get emails you can tell who is from the older generation. For example, the older ones say, ‘We need to give the government time.’ We say ‘No, we have to do this, do that.’ I get excited when I get these emails. I think the battle is being waged by women. Maybe the

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men are now comfortable, their social conditions have changed. But women’s have not. Maybe this is why we are more radical. When it comes to commitment, it is more the women. I find more and more women in NGOs than men. For Akua the issue of generation is conflated with the issue of ‘gender’. The younger generation’s radicalism is related to the increasing number of women who are now involved and their collective experience of social marginalization. For activists the idea of ‘sacrifice’ entails the subordination of a present self to wider interests in both a temporal and a social sense. Since their visions of development are underpinned by a better future for all, they understand the difficulties they face in realizing this vision as a sacrifice on behalf of society as a whole. Recognizing that their visions may not materialize within their lifetime, they view their practical engagements as a sacrifice not so much for a future self, as for a future society.

Faith Activists talk of development as a kind of ‘faith’. While life histories retrospectively explain the kinds of people that activists ‘are’, the ontology of activism is ultimately oriented to a different and better future. ‘Ideology’ is important precisely because it provides a way of imagining that future and holding it in abeyance. This element of faith sometimes prompts activists to speak of development as analogous to religion. Like religion, development involves belief in the possibility that there is more to life than that which inheres in the here and now. Since there is no way to prove whether or when that ‘more’ will materialize, development is said to require faith. For many activists, the connection was more direct. Young Catholics in particular locate their dawning radicalism in relation to religious faith. As an active member of various Catholic organizations in the early 1980s, Albert (Box 3.2) came in contact with the work of a range of liberation theologists. His faith in Catholicism partly emerged as a way of making sense of the circumstances he encountered while growing up. Over time that faith led to a pressing sense of the need for action to alleviate the problems he saw around him. Thus he locates

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motivation for the NGO work he does today in relation to religious conviction: The faith dimension – I want to stress that fact – is critical to the work I’m doing now. And the faith dimension is trying to live to make the faith a reality, you know, in our lives – that is probably one of the prime driving forces. The fact that there is something greater than human desire. And I also believe that we are all co-creators and that the world has to be left better than we enter it. So that desire also to improve upon the world. That’s why ... poverty in any form is not part of God’s creation. So that desire to make the lives of people better, that’s still part of the driving force. For Albert, as for other Young Catholics, liberation theology became a key influence in its insistence that an understanding of the Christian faith entails a political commitment to change society. Members of these organizations retrospectively stress how involvement led to a fundamental shift in outlook. ‘Conscientization’ was a central concept, understood as a constant unveiling of reality that led to an awareness of social and political inequality and the corresponding commitment to ‘social action’. Gabriel directs the local branch of an international advocacy NGO. He relates his present work to his religious faith, suggesting that his ‘social consciousness’ emerged through involvement in the Young Catholic Movement: I think [liberation theology] was that element that people like us needed. You felt you were incomplete without it. I describe it as the component of social action which was absolutely necessary for our growth and development. In a way the spirituality was there, especially for those of us who went to Catholic schools and seminaries. So you could say that your spiritual formation was there in many ways. But the Young Catholic Movement did not just bring social action; it gave the meaning to the spirituality. It made it to be expressed in an action orientation. And a combination of these ideas made you whole. [ ... ] In the African setting where it is not everybody who is getting university education, university automatically made students leaders. But YCS gave you an extra edge to understand what that leadership meant. The leadership that required that you should be of service; that you should bring the leadership to the benefit of communities and of people. The formation too made it possible to understand that.

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The Young Catholic Movement located poverty as a form of ‘structural sin’ and engendered a form of faith that called for radical social transformation. As a campus-based movement most Young Catholics – regardless of family background – were by self-definition ‘elite’. Catholic faith is seen to call for actions that use this structural position not for material self-benefit but for the wider good of society. Gabriel explains: It’s not about being elitist; it’s about bringing yourself down and making it possible for things to happen in terms of transformation, in terms of change – at personal levels, at structural levels, at cultural levels. Martin works as an academic but continues as a member of the board of CHD (Chapter 3), the NGO he helped to set up with a number of other Young Catholics. He similarly suggests that Catholic faith engenders a sense of the responsibility that comes with relative privilege: The gospel implores me to help the helpless, to liberate the poor. If I have managed, somehow to come out of that, even though I won’t say I am rich, at least day to day I have a little I can depend on. What can I do to help all those people that I was with – many people who were very intelligent but could not go beyond the middle school and so the cycle of poverty continues with some of them; is there anything you can do to change that sort of situation? So that’s my motivation, and I guess for many others, the motivation was, we cannot afford to have a system where people remain poor all the time and others are getting richer and richer. Faith is cited as an important influence for other activists and NGO workers from a range of religious backgrounds. Patience (Box 2.3), for example, connects the work of the organization she founded and directs directly to her Pentecostal beliefs: Even our name, the Ark, is actually a symbol of the ark of the covenant which is basically God in the presence of his people as a refuge and a strength. The services we provide, we run a shelter. We see our foundational principles are biblical principles of love mercy and justice. We also hold dear to the UN principles of justice. We are not a religious organization, we are a human rights organization but our

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foundations are taken from religion. I think it is important to use scripture to empower people. In common with other NGO workers, Patience sees her faith as the origin of an orientation that is not itself ‘religious’. Ama works for an international NGO and similarly describes the motivation to engage in development in terms of her Pentecostal upbringing: We are taught to love one another, we are taught to care for one another and in the Bible, I think in James [...] they were talking about faith without works and an example that the Bible gives is that if somebody comes to you and says that he is hungry, and if you send the person away and say that, oh, your fate has made you ill or something, you haven’t ministered to the person, because the person needs food. So to back your faith, there has to be some work – some physical manifestation of what you are believing in. Various forms of religious faith therefore provide the rationale for engagement in development. Such faith entails a moral, ethical and spiritual ‘commitment’ that in turn calls for various kinds of ‘sacrifice’. However, activists from a range of religious and non-religious backgrounds are critical of the potential for organized religion to mitigate against the kinds of social changes they hope for. Sulley (Box 5.1), a Muslim by upbringing, describes the more ‘radical’ attitude of students in the early 1980s, with the ‘disengagement’ of students today: I think that the rise of the charismatic and evangelistic movements doesn’t help. This contributes to a death of interest in taking a stand on national development. People are more focused on ‘this world is not my own, I’m passing through and my treasures are laid up somewhere in heaven’ – you know, that kind of song. So church ... I mean you go to university now, I mean at night you go to the football fields and there are pastors and students praying and speaking in tongues and yelling and that sort of thing. So they are being offered another alternative – don’t let’s struggle and build a better Ghana; we can build a better Ghana through prayers. If activists locate faith as a potential stimulus to action, they also recognize that religious belief has the capacity to curtail this. As such faith

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can mitigate against development by providing an image of a better future based on prayer alone. For activists of all faiths, this entails an orientation to the world that is entirely problematic.

Life history In recent years, life-history approaches have increasingly come to the fore in the social sciences. These have often explicitly sought to counter the concealment of individual ‘agency’ in the more static ‘sociological abstractions’ of a former age (cf. Arnold 2004). In the context of British Trotskyism, the historian Johnson (1996) suggests that life histories add a dimension lacking in documentary accounts, proposing the need to ‘weave together human agency and social structure’ (1996: 46). Similarly, McCaskie (2000) argues that it is problematic to reduce biographical circumstance to sociological generalization, proposing that through biography it is possible to presence ‘individual agency’. Within anthropology, the recent focus on biography and life history (e.g. Caplan 1997, Crapanzano 1980, Herzfeld 1997, Holland and Lave 2000) has similarly been seen as a way of introducing concerns with ‘agency’, in contrast to former concerns with larger social and cultural units of analysis (Caplan 1997, Denzin 1989, Shostak 1981). The narratives of Ghanaian activists demonstrate the problem of conflating ‘agency’ with an analytic focus on ‘the individual’ and that which is ‘personal’. For these activists the capacity to act on the world – to bring about social and political change – is defined through historical structure, rather than in opposition to it. To tell of their ‘lives’ is to tell of historical developments in the country and the political movements they were a part of. Indeed many activists focus on historical developments to the extent that reference to more ‘personal’ aspects of their lives is entirely lacking. This connection of ‘personal’ and ‘national’ history is not simply a matter of the content of these narratives but also of the temporal forms that underpin them. Greenhouse argues that, ‘If personal history is to be fitted into national history, autobiography must be constructed out of the same elements as the collective story of progress modern nation states claim for themselves’ (1996: 180). Activists present their lives through a series of events unfolding progressively through linear time. Personal ‘progress’ through different stages of life emerges as a series of discrete but linked events. These have their counterpart in the nation-state’s image of time unfolding progressively through history. It is because both the ‘personal’ and the ‘state’ narratives take the same

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temporal form that these can be understood as being part of (and relevant to) bigger ‘national’ issues. Life histories are not therefore simple expressions of personal autonomy or agency. Individual ‘difference’ takes a form that is legible even before it acquires its specificities. Greenhouse notes the way in which a common temporal form allows nations (and institutions) to claim the agency of individuals as its own. These NGO workers reverse this equation, appropriating national development as a demonstration of their own agency. Here agency is not made visible in distinction to social or historical context, but through its very invocation.

Activist identities The narratives of Ghanaian NGO activists enact a particular ‘self’ in which individual gain is ideally subordinated to ideological commitment to the transformation and improvement of society. As many of them explicitly recognize, this ideal is not always realized: at a personal level activists talk of the frustrations that result when ideological commitments cannot be enacted; at times they speak of their own wrongheadedness in pursuing ideas to the detriment of practical engagement. As a broader criticism, activists also question the extent to which others are ‘truly’ committed or ‘really’ ideological. A good life is therefore understood to be indexed less by what people say than by what they do, or more precisely as matter of the connection between the two. The conclusion this leads to is not that activists are inherently ‘virtuous’, but that they are profoundly concerned with questions of personal virtue in relation to their own and others’ lives. Ideas of ‘ideology’, ‘radicalism’ and ‘commitment’ should not be taken at face value – a point that activists themselves highlight. However they do provide a moral and ethical framework through which people assess their own and other’s actions. The fact that ideological commitment may in fact be a charade does not amount to a rejection of the ethical framework that underpins the idea but only to a rejection of individuals or groups who contravene these. Over and above the narratives of individual activists, these understandings constitute a broader ethical framework in which a range of claims and identities are refracted. Whether or not people agree about the kind of society that is desirable, or the kinds of actions required to bring this about, they do share an understanding that action is necessary and that the development of a better future will involve the cultivation of particular forms of

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individual virtue. As such, life histories of activist NGO workers put the relationship between (as they see it) the individual and society in stark relief. The ‘development’ of a better society calls for the ‘development’ of better kinds of self.

Conclusion What might this finding add to existing literatures on development and on African elites? My suggestion is that an ethnographic understanding of how development discourses are ethically configured highlights the limitations of socially and economically reductionism thinking in relation to development and African elites. In line with a broader Afro-pessimism (Werbner 2004), progressive and developmentalist discourses have tended to be understood as a charade behind which selfish acts of accumulation and aggrandizement are concealed. For political scientists such as Chabal and Daloz (1999), and in a similar though more nuanced vein Bayart (1986; 1993), NGOs present a set of resources that elites exploit to their own advantage. In this light, the cynical appropriation of various development related resources is regarded as an instance of ‘extroversion’, whereby educated Africans exploit their positions of social privilege for personal gain. From a rather different perspective, the anthropologist Ferguson (1994) also submerges moral issues, arguing that in the case of Lesotho, development organizations have acted to reinforce the position of the ruling elites by naturalizing political and economic inequality through ostensibly apolitical bureaucratic discourses. More recently Englund’s (2006) ethnography of NGOs in Malawi takes up similar themes, suggesting that, paradoxically, the language of human rights has often been used to create the very distinctions between elites and ‘the grassroots’ that they purport to overcome. My analysis does not preclude the possibility that ‘bad’ outcomes can result from ‘good’ intentions. However it does suggest that a tendency to locate ‘reality’ in the nefarious, if unwitting strategies of development elites, precludes analysis of NGO workers’ intentions – good or bad. What drops out from this picture is a sense of the personal choices and moral conundrums that particular aid workers grapple with. My argument is that the complexity of the ideas and motivations that inform various kinds of development work cannot be readily comprehended from a framework in which claims to moral and ethical virtue are a priori understood to conceal political and economic motivation.

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It is perhaps an obvious point but one that a range of literatures seem to have missed: it is as absurd to dismiss all developmentally oriented discourses as entirely nefarious, as it is to take them literally at face value.

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3 Personal Relations, Public Debates

Lucas (Box 1.2) and I are on our way to the headquarters of the NGO he has just set up in one of the rapidly expanding suburbs of Ghana’s capital, Accra. We pick our way slowly along the heavily rutted road in his pickup and he starts to tell me more about his new NGO. For some time now, the governing NPP has been pursuing a policy of water privatization. His NGO is going to protest against this policy. He outlines the inequities that will result from the ‘neo-liberal travesty’ this will unleash and then, with a steely sense of purpose, the measures his organization will take to try to stop the policy. He spent much of his youth engaged in socialist political movements and connects the ideological orientations that developed through this to the work of the NGO he now runs. What Lucas also makes clear is the ongoing significance of the personal relations that developed alongside these political engagements: ‘The mobilization we did in the 1980s remains relevant to Ghanaian politics today. There’s hardly any town I’ve been to where I am not able to identify somebody who was a student during those days and that took part in those actions.’ Lucas explains how his involvement in political activism has enabled him to develop a network of relations that remain important to the work he does today. But his point is more general. For Lucas personal relationships are the very means by which civil society can function effectively. They enable consensus to be built and allow resources to be effectively marshalled. According to him, it is only in this way that NGOs can hold the government, donors and powerful organizations to account. Over the past two decades donor discourses of ‘good governance’ have located problems of development as a matter of the absence of formal accountability. These critiques have been made particularly strongly in relation to Africa, where the continent’s manifest ‘failures’ have 77

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increasingly been located as a matter of ‘corruption’, ‘nepotism’ and ‘neo-patrimonialism’. More or less explicitly, these discourses assume that personal relations have eroded public accountability and transparency, enabling elites to bypass formal institutional procedure. In this context, international donors, led by the World Bank and IMF, have sought to eradicate the influence of ‘personal relations’, through various forms of institutional ‘capacity building’ and through the development of stronger regulatory frameworks. Ghanaian NGO workers are also outspoken in their criticism of ‘corruption’ and ‘nepotism’. However, their own understanding of the relationship between personal relations and public accountability complicates any simplistic opposition between these. For these development professionals, personal relations are imagined as a resource to be tapped: they provide the basis for formal collaborations between organizations within the NGO sector and also make it possible to enlist the help of people outside it. Similarly they are important in enabling access to funds and resources. In this sense being an effective NGO worker depends on being ‘connected’; pursuing a particular set of aims or ideas depends on knowing the people who can make this happen – and knowing how and when to use them. This perspective foregrounds the importance of relations that are not formally or institutionally recognized in enabling particular forms of transparency and accountability. My argument is not that these are effective despite their ‘personal’ and ‘informal’ characteristics but that these traits constitute their very condition of possibility. Personal relations ‘work’ precisely because they operate in a different register to formal institutional procedure, and therefore allow connections to be made in different ways. This, however, does not amount to an uncritical embrace of all forms of personal relation. NGO workers distinguish between different kinds of interpersonal relationship on the basis of their moral and ethical content. Specifically, the ‘ideological’ foundation of friendship is distinguished from various other kinds of relationship whose affective bases more readily lead to a conflict of personal and public interest. In practice the moral content of specific relationships may be debated, as is the question of how – and even whether – these can be legitimately deployed. Accusations of ‘corruption’ within the NGO sector are not uncommon. My suggestion is not that personal relations are necessarily virtuous, but that they are necessarily integral to the way in which these organizations work.

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Civil society and personal relations in Africa During the 1990s, Africa’s development problems were increasingly framed in terms of a deficit of ‘good governance’. In this context, the expansion of ‘civil society’ was often equated with the expansion of NGOs (Bratton 1989, Fowler 1991, Igoe and Kelsall 2005). Though the appeal of the concept arguably lay in its loose definition (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999), a variety of development organizations and academic commentators borrowed from the writings of de Tocquville in arguing that the proliferation of free-associations, independent from the state and from affective relations – specifically of kinship and ethnicity – would act to enhance democracy (e.g. Gyimah-Boadi 1996, Harbeson 1994). Against this, a range of critical commentators have pointed to the shortcomings of employing political concepts deriving from Western traditions of thought in the context of Africa (e.g. Bornstein 2005, Fowler 1991, Jackson 2005, Rawlence 2005). In two highly influential accounts, Bayart (1986, 1993) questions the usefulness of Western notions of civil society by highlighting the prevalence in Africa of affective relationships of kinship and ethnicity through which actors ‘straddle’ state and society. Factional struggles, he suggests, dominate over class politics, precluding the formation of groups based around common concerns or interests. What he terms the ‘reciprocal assimilation’ (1993: chapter 6) of elites leads to the fusion of different ‘personal networks’, collapsing the distinction between the state and the private order, foundational to Western political thought. From a similar perspective, the political scientists Chabal and Daloz see the recent burgeoning of NGOs as a ‘facade’ (1999: 16), suggesting that while they speak in the name of ‘civil society’ and the public good, they are simply new vehicles through which African elites tap into external sources of revenue. NGOs, they suggest, ‘are nothing more than new “structures” with which Africans can seek to establish an instrumentally profitable position within the existing system of neo-patrimonialism’ (1999: 22). Although more pessimistic about the potential for positive change, this account chimes with donor perceptions of the problem, highlighting how organizational goals have been subordinated to the personal interests of individuals, pursued through informal networks of personal relations. Such accounts explicitly draw on a more widespread understanding that in Africa a fundamental antipathy exists between personal

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relations and corporate interest. Recent accounts of civil society therefore rejoin with earlier commentators in observing how commitments to the extended family and territorially and ethnically defined affective relations have acted to undermine the development of formal systems of bureaucratic conduct (Ekeh 1975, LeVine 1975, Mafeje 1971, Price 1975). As Comaroff and Comaroff observe, these accounts of civil society have tended to reproduce more widely held stereotypes about the continent, leading to a situation in which ‘Africa’s difference once more becomes a deficit’ (1999: 17). Breaking with the normative perspectives through which this ‘deficit’ is constructed, others have highlighted the potentially more positive role that personal relations can fulfil. For example, Karlstrom (1999) elucidates how in Uganda kinship is positively valued as a model of public integration, calling into question Western understandings that such relations are necessarily private and exclusive. More ambiguously, MacGaffey (1994) argues that in Zaire, networks of personal ties simultaneously constitute the means by which some individuals consolidate their advantageous position and others engage in resistance to oppressive regimes. The significance of personal relations in undermining or enabling the articulation of public interest therefore remains theoretically contested. Yet in placing their own evaluation of how such relations enable or constrain, commentators on both sides of this debate have tended to overlook the ways in which NGO workers themselves explain and describe these relational forms. By taking seriously actors’ own descriptions of the personal relations they engage in, the chapter looks at the contested ways in which these are imagined to enable and/or constrain organizationally enshrined aims, and the social visions these articulate. This, in turn, provides a more nuanced understanding of how personal relations and public virtue may practically and conceptually intersect. The account focuses on the historical formation of two Catholic NGOs, examining the often ambiguous role of personal relations in the context of the organizations’ wider aims. The latter part of the chapter broadens the focus to explore how similar tensions are articulated by activists and NGO workers more generally.

Catholics for Action Catholics for Action (CFA) is a small community development NGO, located in a modest office in a squat concrete building off the main Accra–Kumasi road. Funded mostly by international Catholic agencies,

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the organization attempts to use the gospel as the basis for concrete actions to help the ‘poor and oppressed’. Practically they seek to accomplish this through a variety of activities including undertaking smallscale community projects and various advocacy initiatives. Founded in 1981 by a small group of Catholic students centred around the University of Science and Technology in Ghana’s second largest city, Kumasi, the organization was set up with the aim of putting into practice the teachings of liberation theologists. Many of those initially involved in the organization have since gone on to play important roles as subsequent founders of some of the country’s largest NGOs, and as important public figures in various other spheres. The organization has therefore been central to the development of a network of people, whose personal relations have in many cases outlived their involvement with CFA. A brochure produced by the organization immediately following its inception describes their aim: ‘to live out the radical message of the gospel, epitomized in the liberation of the poor and oppressed’. These ideologies are further elaborated through interviews with founder members. Significantly these ideological orientations are not seen simply as the basis for the organization but also as the basis for the interpersonal relations that developed between them. Joseph (Box 3.1), one of the eight founder members of CFA, left some time ago when funding difficulties made it impossible for him to remain involved. He now works as a marketing manager for the international drinks firm, Guinness. At his suggestion we meet one afternoon in the up-market Novotel hotel. As we sit chatting at the side of the pool, expats lie sprawled on sun loungers and a group of young Ghanaians splash boisterously around a beach ball. Gesturing vaguely at the surrounding scene, Joseph contrasts the evident wealth of Accra’s contemporary elites with the experiences of poverty and hardship that led him and others to want to set about changing things for the better. In the 1970s, mass corruption led to a situation in which conditions for the poorest members of society were increasingly unacceptable. For him, as for other CFA founders, the teachings of liberation theologists provided a way of understanding this inequality and a moral imperative to act upon these. In this context he locates the organization’s formation in the central importance of using the gospel to bring about social and political change: There was a new consciousness of using Christianity, not as a church thing, but as a community thing, as a society thing, as a political tool. Not a political tool in the sense of just political leadership, but for political change, to effect the national economy – everything.

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Box 3.1 Joseph I was born in Accra. But my mother was a trader and my father was a junior level civil servant, so we moved around the country a lot. I suppose you’d say that my parents were just ordinary folk. We weren’t among the poorest but we certainly weren’t rich. I went to a government school but fortunately I worked quite hard and I passed the common entrance exam. That meant I was able to attend Saint Augustine’s, which is one of the country’s elite boarding schools and a very different kind of place to anything I’d been used to. In those days education was a lot more meritocratic so background was much less important. Then after I’d completed my A levels I went to the University of Ghana, where I read Social Sciences. That was when I became active in organizations like Pax Romana and the Young Catholic Movement more generally. At the time, there was a lot wrong with society, and Catholicism seemed to provide a framework for me to understand what was going on. But also I met a lot of like-minded people. Many of them became good friends, and actually lots of them still are. After I graduated I did my National Service working at the Catholic Council which was an umbrella body for all the Catholic organizations in the country. Many of those I met there were frustrated with the church. Like those I’d met at university we were keen to find ways of putting the ideas we’d been talking about into practice. That’s why in 1983 a group of us set up the NGO CHD. I became the first joint coordinator. But it’s easy to talk about social change and sometimes the reality is a lot more complicated. We were all young and ideological. We all had strong ideas but they didn’t always coincide. So there was a lack of cohesion and also a lack of experience in the group. For me there were also more personal reasons for wanting to leave. We didn’t really have any funding at that time and I didn’t feel I could keep relying on my parents for financial support. So in 1984, I got out and took a job that led to my current job which is working as marketing manager for a multinational drinks company. I guess you could say that I’ve sold out and actually a lot of people do tease me about that! But to my mind, I still believe in the same basic ideals and although I’m not so practically engaged I do still try to put them into practice in my life. I’m still friends with lots of those people I met as a student and actually I’m on the CHD board, so I also help out in that way.

More generally, CFA members describe the importance they attach to the ‘action, reflection, action’ methodology used in their study groups. Drawing on the writings of liberation theologists such as Bishop Romero and Paolo Freire, the idea was not simply to discuss issues, but to use reflections as the basis for action. Albert (Box 3.2), another of the CFA founder members, left to set up his own NGO in the mid 1980s but remains committed to the

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ideologies that originally led to the organization’s inception. An imposing man in both stature and demeanour, he now runs one of the country’s leading community development organizations, focusing on projects promoting the rights of children. Talking to me in the NGO’s headquarters – an impressively large building in an otherwise impoverished neighbourhood of Accra – he connects CFA’s approach to the one he continues to take: ‘The idea was that you intervened and God supported you. It was not just about talking but also about doing things.’ Later he describes how attempts were made to implement community projects and to use these as a way of ‘conscientizing’2 villagers about inequalities between the rich and the poor. A project undertaken in a village near Kumasi enabled them to go beyond the theorizing and thinking of their study sessions: We were toying with Paulo Freire’s idea of pedagogy for the poor. One of the words that leapt out from his writings was conscientization. I remember we went to the village and worked with the local community. It was basically an attempt to help these people put up a structure – a clinic or something – but it was an attempt by us to put into practice some of the things we had learnt. In the evenings they would talk to villagers about social inequality, attempting to make them aware of their position in society. Contrasting their own approach with that of the mainstream church, CFA members saw these kinds of activities as a means to go beyond ‘ideas’ and ‘rhetoric’ and put the teachings of the gospel ‘into practice’. From this perspective ideology is not opposed to ‘action’ but provides a stimulus to social change (Chapter 3). It is in the pursuit of this social vision that personal relations became instrumentally useful. Friendships are based on the need to act and provide the context in which this becomes possible.

Friends and Brothers Relationships within the group are imagined to have a number of particular qualities encapsulated in the term ‘friendship’. During this period ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ differences were widely regarded as socially and politically divisive, and the basis for various ‘corrupt’ and ‘nepotistic’ relations. Members of CFA came from various ethnic groups including Ewe (who at the time constituted much of the support for Rawlings’ regime under the Provisional National Defence Committee) and Akan

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Box 3.2 Albert I come from a low-class family. My mother was a petty trader, so we never had much. We lived in the slums of Accra, so we knew what poverty was. But though I came from a humble background, my parents sacrificed a lot and somehow they managed to send me to Achimota School.1 It was there that I became an active member of the YCS, which opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the world, that has basically been at the heart of everything I have subsequently done. I started reading lots of the books written by liberation theologists – people like Paulo Freire and Gustavo Gutierrez. They talked about social action as a way of living with the Christian faith and trying to live to make faith a reality in our lives. Not just seeing the gospel as an abstract thing but the idea we are co-creators and the world has to be left better than when we entered it; that poverty in any form is not a part of God’s creation. I graduated in 1982 and went to work at the international headquarters of the YCS in Paris but in 1982 Rawlings came to power talking about a lot of the things that we were also talking about in the YCS. So I wanted to return to Ghana, to help the country and to help Rawlings succeed. At first I was just working as an estate agent, but there the emphasis was all on material accumulation and values that were basically the opposite of everything I believed in. In 1983 I was the driving force behind the foundation of the NGO CHD. The idea was basically to put into practice all of the things that we had been talking about in the YCS. But also, I’d been to Paris and had come to see that in Africa we couldn’t go on as we were. We needed to take a more professional approach to development. The fellow founders of CHD were all members of the YCS, so I thought there’d be a shared vision but tensions soon emerged, which, looking back, were partly ideological and partly personal. That’s why I left in 1985 to set up the NGO which I’ve continued to direct since then.

(the main stronghold of support for a more conservative tradition of politics). While the group came from diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, CFA members describe the common beliefs that connected them. Reflecting on the evolution of the organization, Martin, another of the founder members, explains, ‘because our views were so similar, it was easy for us to get together and have fun. And as we continued to have fun, the bonds became stronger’. He describes how the group formed an ‘open brotherhood’ in which relationships were intimate and enduring: ‘If you went round to friends, you knew without being told that you had an invitation to eat – that helped to cement the bonds a lot. We had parties but it was not like you would get a big sound system and invite a lot: it was more like a family gathering.’

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While the group was ‘small’ and ‘intimate’, these friendships are understood to be ‘national’ in scope, connecting people from all over the country and from different social backgrounds. In describing such relations as ‘national’, members also draw attention to the ethnic composition of the group, seeing parallels between their own ethnic diversity and that of the nation. These relations are also imagined as nationalistic, contributing to the development of a properly functioning state. Martin explains that because members came from a variety of different social backgrounds, their collaboration was a sign of hope for the country. Describing their relationships in terms of ‘friendship’, CFA members actively downplay the importance of other kinds of affiliations. As such, they present these relationships as exemplary, contributing to a country in which what you knew, rather than who you knew counted. Gabriel was not directly involved in the organization, but became friends with a number of CFA members through his involvement in the wider Young Catholic Movement. Reflecting on the period in which CFA developed, he contrasts the relationships within the organization with those that predominated in the country more generally: The corruption was unprecedented. You could only do what you wanted depending on who you knew: which part of Ghana you were from made a difference. But they came from across the country and that created a space for them to look at one another not in terms of tribe or in terms of geography. They gathered around common aspirations that went beyond the boundaries of ethnicity and class. Where ‘corruption’ was rife, it became the norm to use personal relations for personal gain. CFA members describe a predicament in which it became common to favour family and friends to the detriment of the wider public good. By contrast they describe relations within the group as ‘open’ and ‘meritocratic’, defined in terms of ideals and aspirations rather than along more ostensibly exclusive criteria of social and cultural membership. The legitimacy of the organization to speak on matters of public importance lay in the nationally representative constitution of its members. CFA members describe these friendships as novel and even unprecedented in the context of the period. In contrast to prevailing ‘corruption’, they highlight their own distinctiveness from one another, and the ‘ideological’ basis of their relations. By contrast to relations based on kinship or ethnicity, friendship is premised on a conception of

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people as originally distinct (see also Bell and Coleman 1999, Carrier 1999, Paine 1999, Rezende 1999). In this sense intellectual engagement is only considered possible through detachment from other potentially compromising relations. The ‘independence’ of friends is related to the idea that such relationships are voluntary and open to negotiation. Some members describe the persistence of friendships made through their involvement in CFA in the early 1980s, but present this as a matter of ongoing ideological connection. Now in his late 40s, Charles (Box 4.1) worked as one of the first paid coordinators for CFA during the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he left to help set up his own NGO. Living with Charles over the course of six months I came to see the enduring importance of friendships forged through this historical period. Many of the CFA members continue to live locally. Despite now working in different organizations, many continue to collaborate professionally. Some also continue to see each other socially. Talking to me about these relations he highlights the enduring ‘ideological’ connections that sustain them: We still are together; we still challenge each other. We don’t always see eye to eye, but those you don’t see too much eye to eye with, you don’t carry on with. If friendship is premised upon shared ideals, then by the same token these can be severed by disagreements. Members describe how they maintain relationships with those in the group with whom they continue to share an ‘ideological connection’, while disputes or differences of opinion lead people to drift apart. The anthropologist Paine (1999) suggests that the ideological foundation of friendship makes it particularly apposite in adversarial contexts: The worth of adversarial culture is its readiness to challenge moral and social contradictions, and the ideal friendship relationship with its own rules of relevancy is made for that. However, the practice of adversarial culture (beyond its hortatory rhetoric) introduces argument beyond argument, fundamental differences. What, then, when friends find themselves on opposing sides? [...] Adversary culture depends on the support of the idea-value culture found in the ideal code of friendship and yet, on occasions, it may wound, even destroy, such friendships. The likely causes of these casualties are [...] disagreement, more often than not of an ethical kind (1999: 48–49).

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If adversarial culture inheres in a readiness to challenge social norms, then friendship, with its basis in shared ideas and values, often provides the context in which this arises. The paradox, Paine suggests, is that such a culture frequently generates the very conditions in which disagreements emerge, leading to the termination of the friendships that social movements are often built on. In these contexts friendship is an inherently unstable relation. This view resonates with CFA members’ own understandings of friendship. As a personal relationship that is built on ideological connection, it does not compromise the independence of the values and beliefs of the individuals it connects. Alongside this understanding, CFA members believe that friendship engenders a capacity to bridge ideological differences and forge alliances between distinct organizations. While CFA members stress the ideological foundation of such relations, they nonetheless speak of their capacity to ground disagreement and debate. In this vein former CFA members continue to stress that ‘because we are friends we can disagree’. As such, they speak of a capacity to detach the ‘personal’ from the ‘ideological’. In other words, ideological disagreement is a particular kind of detachment that friendship allows for. CFA members describe how friendships have sometimes been used to further the aims and ideologies of the organization. Shortly after the 1981 revolution that brought Rawlings to power, Peoples’ Defence Committees were created with the ostensible aim of broadening democratic participation. In December 1984, their name was changed to the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution. Angered by a perceived breach of the regime’s stated ideology, members of CFA issued a public statement published in a number of national newspapers elucidating how the new name went ‘contrary to the fundamental principles of the revolutionary process’. In short, they argued, it was no longer for ‘the people’. Just over a month later, a similar statement was publicly issued, co-signed on behalf of the New Democratic Movement (NDM), a Marxist political organization previously closely aligned with the government (Chapter 1). Peter (Box 3.3), an active CFA member, explains the importance of personal relationships in forging this alliance: ‘We are all Catholic people, we are friends. When they passed through Kumasi we slept in the same houses and so forth. So when [the NDM] said they wanted to share a statement, we said “no problem”.’ Later he explains that ‘informal mechanisms’ were particularly important in the authoritarian political culture of the time: ‘Things were very fluid and you needed to be able to build a network in order to put your ideas across; in order to be able to help control things and bring them on an even keel.’ Friendships

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Box 3.3 Peter I grew up in Kumasi, in a middle-class family. My father worked for the government at the Ministry of Education, and my mother was a nurse and subsequently a teacher. Both my parents were active Catholics and many of my brothers and sisters were involved in the Young Catholic Movement, which I joined at secondary school level. Through this, I became increasingly aware of social and political inequalities and the need for very practical actions to remedy the problems. At secondary school I also spent much of my free time at the Saint Lois Training College. My ideas about the need for theologically informed social and political action were also influenced by a number of the nuns who taught there. After leaving secondary school I spent fifteen months teaching before starting a degree. As an undergraduate I was very active in student politics and served on the Student Representative Council of the National Union of Ghana Students. During this period I also helped to set up CFA, along with a small group of friends and acquaintances I’d got to know through the Young Catholic Movement. I graduated in 1984 and began teaching biology at a Catholic secondary school for girls. But I was still very active in CFA and in politics more generally. I was a founding member of the local branch of Rawlings’ NDC party, and was initially an ardent supporter of the revolutionary process. But my support for the regime waned over time. Basically a lot of people sold out on the ideals they started out with and maybe for some of them those beliefs were never that genuine in the first place. I became increasingly outspoken, really just airing the frustrations that a lot of us had and that led to my ejection from the party. At the moment I’m working as an academic and I’m still an active member of CFA. I also do quite a bit of development consultancy – mostly just to pay the bills and to keep doing the other things that I believe in. And I’m also in the process of setting up an NGO, which I hope will go some small way towards addressing some of the pressing environmental issues that we’re confronting at the moment – here in Ghana and in the world at large.

enabled the organization’s independence from government by allowing the formation of coalitions that were less prone to persecution. In a situation in which formal means of opposition were closed off, civil society, in the words of another CFA member, was forced to ‘go underground’, becoming increasingly dependent upon a set of personal relations invisible from the perspective of the state. Many of the understandings of friendship that CFA members articulate bear striking similarities to what Carrier (1999) refers to as the ‘ideal Western form’. Friendship is a specific way of thinking about affective relations. It depends on a notion of a ‘self’ seen to exist independently of external constraints of alliance, faction and patronage and free from self-interest; it is imagined to be based on affection and sentiment; and

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it is therefore seen to arise on the basis of common interests and values rather than social or class distinctions. Yet if such ideas of friendship echo those encountered in other Western contexts, there is a specificity to the context in which they are articulated, which prompts a degree of self-consciousness about what friendship is and is not. In claiming to associate as ‘friends’, CFA members explicitly see themselves in distinction to the perceived norms of society. In this context, the autonomous ‘self’ is not an a priori given, but a positive achievement that entails a commitment to ‘ideology’ and, as a corollary, the non-recognition of the significance of other relational forms (cf. Reed 2003).

The Centre for Human Development The Centre for Human Development (CHD) is currently one of Ghana’s largest national development NGOs, with three main offices and over fifty permanent staff. Through undertaking community development projects throughout Ghana, it aims to foster ‘people-centred development’. The organization was founded in 1983 by eight men. All had known one another through the Young Catholic Movement; many had been actively involved in CFA. Founders of CHD suggest that while CFA was essentially a ‘reflective’ and ‘philosophical’ organization, CHD enabled them to put their ideas ‘into practice’. Many express this difference in terms of the teachings of liberation theology and the motto ‘think then act’. Albert (Box 3.2) was active in CFA and later became the chair of CHD. Echoing sentiments of other members, he describes the complementary relationship between the two: ‘CHD and CFA were working hand in hand. It was the same people that started CFA that also thought of CHD. CFA became like a think tank and then CHD became like a vehicle for implementation.’ CHD founder members were motivated by their Catholic beliefs, but wanted the NGO to transcend religious differences. Accordingly CHD was conceived as a ‘faith-based secular NGO’. The organization would pursue issues regardless of faith or creed. James played a leading role in the early development of CHD, having earlier helped to set up CFA. He explains: ‘We didn’t go with a religious hat. For us the Bible was something to be lived.’ CHD enabled people to pursue the convictions and beliefs that derived from their Catholic faith, in a secular context. The organization’s first chairman, Albert (Box 3.2) elucidates the organization’s wider social role: CHD was an attempt by like-minded people to bring about what we thought society should be about. We thought that there was too

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much talking and that something needed to be done. We wanted to do something concrete to help the development of the country. Personal relations played an ambivalent role in furthering these goals. Describing the organization’s foundation, CHD members emphasize the importance of participation of a wide range of people. ‘Inclusiveness’ is therefore held as a central value. The minutes for the first formal meeting record that ‘the centre is for the interest of all within the limits of the orientation and should therefore cater for a variety of groups and interests: political, religious, social, cultural’. Criteria for organizational membership is framed in universalistic terms: ‘Commitment to the poor and the struggle of the poor and oppressed should be one of the most important criteria for membership.’ In this light, the ethnic composition, religious orientation and gender of the eight founding members was identified as a problem. Five of the eight founder members were Ewes.3 This fed into wider fears at the time concerning the tribalization of public life.4 In a working paper produced in 1984, Kodjo, himself an Ewe, elucidates CHD’s problems of ‘image and ethnic base’: It appears that the initial formation of CHD was shrouded in so much secrecy that many of our colleagues in the youth movement simply do not know or have very funny ideas about CHD. One area that requires urgent attention is the ethnic composition of CHD. Prior to my admission, five of the seven members currently in Ghana were Ewes [...] If this is inserted into the current situation in Ghana where there is a fear of Ewe hegemony then it becomes clear that this issue cannot be taken lightly. What makes it even more serious is that some of our own colleagues see CHD as an Ewe club. The ethnic composition of the organization and longstanding relationships between those involved are therefore seen as barriers to the realization of CHD’s universal vision. Kodjo suggests that the remedy lies in the need to ‘broaden the ethnic base’ and ‘guard against uncritically carrying over structures attitudes etc. from our YCS/Pax Romana5 days’. Subsequent minutes document how efforts were made during the late 1980s to broaden CHD’s approach. Non-Catholics were recruited to the board with the explicit intention of ‘diffusing the Catholic orientation’, and a number of women were encouraged to become board members. The explicitly universal rhetoric of the organization is related to the stated importance of remaining ‘independent’, both from other

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organizations and from the government. Minutes note that the pursuit of the organizational ideals is paramount and should not be compromised. Reflecting on the organization’s development during the 1980s, founder members draw different conclusions about the role of personal relations in compromising or enabling this independence. Albert (Box 3.2), the organization’s first chairman, suggests that personal relationships with key members of the government were key to challenging its ideas: What we were doing is that we were using the government’s own rhetoric to hold them accountable for what they were saying. So we’d go to the minister and say, ‘This is what you said but you are not doing it. Why not?’ Because we had some access to the state, some access to higher government, they were scared At a time in which many of the formal channels for advocacy were blocked, personal relations provided both access and influence. CHD founder members contrast the legitimate use of personal relations for the ‘ideological’ ends of a better society, with their use for personal gain. CHD members sometimes relate their lack of ‘connections’ to their ‘idealism’. Talking to me about the corruption of the period, Martin suggests that his ‘humble background’ meant that these kinds of contacts were never open to him. Beyond this accident of circumstance he connects his opposition to ‘corruption’ to a wider moral certitude: ‘We had independent minds, we did everything the way we thought it should be done.’

Funding and independence Gaining the funds to carry out projects and run the centre was a key preoccupation of the organization, particularly in CHD’s first few years when lack of funding was a key constraint on the centre’s activities. Although the need to find sources of finance was therefore pressing, this was attended by a desire to stay independent from the donors. The issue, as those active in CHD during this period describe it, was how to get the funds that would enable them to pursue their projects, without this compromising the values and ideals for which they stood. In attempting to gain funding, CHD members explicitly recognize the difficulty of doing so on the basis of ‘ideas alone’. In minutes of

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a meeting held in 1984 it is recorded that ‘there is a need to be aware that funding agencies sometimes deal more favourably with people they know on personal levels rather than just ideas’. While advocating the ideal of the institutional independence, they therefore recognize the strategic importance of personal relationships in achieving this end. The desirability of these ‘connections’ was such that a number of people were recruited with the explicit intention that they could facilitate contacts with donors. Minutes from a meeting in 1984 record that friends from the Young Catholic Movement should be made members ‘In line with developing CHD presence abroad [...] so that they can maintain an active link with the development agencies and funding bodies in their respective countries’. In this way friendships were utilized to give the organization an important ‘international’ presence. While friendship is therefore seen to present instrumental possibilities, CHD members regard these functions as incidental. It is precisely because they do not seek personal benefit from their relationships with one another, that friends can be trusted. Paradoxically, their functions (from an analytic perspective) derive from the non-functionalist logic that underpins them. By contrast, ‘connections’ and ‘contacts’ are defined precisely in relation to their instrumental qualities. Being based on practical expediency and sometimes entailing duplicity, such relations are regarded as morally dubious. Nonetheless members acknowledge that making ‘connections’ is important. The capacity to do so is seen as a skill that people possess to varying degrees. Minutes from a meeting in 1984 record that when CHD gained funds to enable one of their members to attend a conference in Europe, the decision was taken to send Albert (Box 3.2) on the basis that his previous work overseas made him most capable of establishing the necessary ‘contacts’. ‘Networking’, understood as the capacity to cultivate instrumentally valuable personal relations, is therefore seen as an important skill.

Conflict and division The minutes of an emergency meeting, called on 3 September 1984, document the resignation of Simon (Box 1.3), the CHD coordinator along with Albert (Box 3.2), the secretary. The event was a pivotal moment in the organization’s history, resulting in the fracturing of the group.

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While some remained to build the organization, others left. Albert and Simon went on to set up NGOs that are now influential organizations in their respective fields. The resignations arose from longstanding tensions, whose source remains a matter of some debate. In their retrospective analysis of the situation, many locate the disagreement as a matter of ‘ideology’. Joseph was present during the debates that took place and describes how differences emerged as to the direction the centre should take: We were clear in our minds about our criticism of society. What was not clear was a shared position on how the centre should be used to address the issues; what the centre stood for, what it could achieve and how you could achieve it [...]. As we went into the details, very different viewpoints began to emerge and bringing them together was a real difficulty. The genesis of the dispute is located in relation to the different role members believed the organization should play. While some became involved in ‘grass-roots’ and ‘practical’ activities, others saw social transformation in terms of wider political change. Others locate the issues as ‘personal’. Albert (Box 3.2), the CHD chairman at the time, later left to set up his own NGO. He locates the problem as a matter of interpersonal differences: ‘What began to emerge was the issue of generation, the issue of friendships.’ From his perspective disputes arose from close personal relationships in part deriving from the different backgrounds they came from. Similar ideas are expressed in the minutes from the emergency meeting which note one member’s suggestion that ‘maybe the problem is one of personalities’. If, as CHD founders imagine, friendship has both ‘ideological’ and ‘personal’ levels to it, then a disconnection at one leads to a disconnection at the other. Dispute focuses on whether ideological differences precipitated ‘personal’ differences, or vice versa. In this sense, friendship is an ambiguous relationship. Although premised on the independence of the people it connects, it is also seen to compromise personal autonomy, through the loyalties and bonds that develop. Personal autonomy and independence are imagined as the very basis upon which such relationships are founded. Yet at times personal differences magnify to the point that relationships can no longer be sustained.

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Political activists and personal relations These ideas of friendship find wider resonance within the contemporary NGO sector. NGO workers and activists articulate a similar ambivalence regarding the problems and possibilities of personal relations in the context of ideological and organizational goals. In particular, former members of political organizations such as the NDM and June Fourth Movement (JFM) speak of the ongoing significance of the relationships that developed through this in terms of their work in the contemporary NGO sector (Chapter 1). As with members of CFA and CHD, former political activists often describe these relationships in terms of ‘friendship’, imagining these to be ideologically based. Mawuli (Chapter 1), worked as a political activist in the 1980s but returned to set up an advocacy NGO in the early 1990s. He highlights the ongoing strategic importance of relationships derived from past political activism, relating their legitimacy to their ‘ideological’ foundation. By contrast to the corruption of government officials, they were based ‘purely on a shared vision of how Ghana should develop’. Later he explains: ‘We went into the movement only for political purposes. I got to know them as friends because I became politically connected with them. So I would go to their houses and have a drink. Before I was part of the movement, I wouldn’t go to their houses to have a drink’. For Mawuli, the ‘personal’ relationship derives from the ‘political’ relationship. Because such friendships have their basis in shared ‘ideology’ and shared ‘politics’ they persist only so long as ideological similarities remain: You go into political movements as an intense personal commitment and a fierce commitment to do something. So your bonding is also very fierce. But precisely because you went there for personal commitment, you also have the fiercest fallings-out. When you fall out, you fall out because you are fighting about your dreams. So friendships made out of the process of politics get exploded when the politics explode. The political turbulence of the country is seen to have its counterpart in the turbulent nature of interpersonal relations among activists. Shifts taking place at the level of ‘personal relations’ proceed from the dynamics of shifts taking place between organizations and factions of national politics. Activists sometimes talk of the ways in which the ideas and

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dreams of the 1980s were shattered by Rawlings’ betrayal of the revolution and the values it stood for. Ideological disputes around this period were often related to the ‘factionalism’ that resulted and to the termination of longstanding relationships. Activists acknowledge the capacity for such interpersonal relationships to displace formal organizational procedure. Where this undermines accountability and transparency and where personal relations uphold personal interests this is regarded as problematic. Emmanuel (Box 1.1), a former political activist currently working as a development consultant, describes Ghanaian civil society as ‘an illusion’: Africans like to connect with who they know, where they come from. Kinship is very important. When they organize, they tend to bring along who they know and a lot of these formations shape the way NGOs organize. Even in terms of modern governance structures there is an illusion of independent institutionally organized structure. But if you go deeper, you find a network of relations that either go back to the past, a shared history of experience, or are basically from university. More generally, activists echo donor rhetoric in describing the potentially neo-patrimonial nature of their own personal relations. As a form of self-critique they acknowledge the capacity of these relations to curtail open public debate. Often this critique leads to calls for the need to build better and more effective institutional structures. However, in a variety of contexts, the strategic use of such relations is seen in a more positive light. Personal relations are imagined to enable independence from the government, by making it possible to unify groups in a strong and independent ‘civil society voice’. NGO workers frequently express frustration at the government’s propensity to ‘personalize’ disagreements, regarding ‘networks’ and ‘coalitions’ as the means of putting these disputes on a more ‘objective’ footing. Samuel was involved in various socialist political organizations during the 1980s and now works as a project officer at an international NGO. He criticizes the government for its propensity to ‘politicize’ public organizations, suggesting to me: We are building a strong body of these coalitions. We are moving behind one another. It is easy just to look like one NGO, but if you make it look like a whole bunch of civil society, then the government can’t put one particular NGO under the microscope.

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He acknowledges that formal coalitions are important but suggests that in practice personal relations are often important in forging these. Personal relations are also regarded as an important means by which to gain public visibility. Samuel explains the enduring pragmatic significance of relationships that developed during his involvement in student politics in terms of their strategic importance: If you want to get something across to the media, you can easily identify colleagues who are working for the media and see what support you can get from them in terms of airing things that are of national concern that you can’t get out any other way. While personal relations provide the basis for formal collaborations between organizationally distinct NGOs, they also enable NGO workers to enlist the help of people outside the NGO sector. In particular, personal relations deriving from activist engagements are presented as important in enlisting media support and access to government. Personal relations therefore enable coalitions between formally distinct organizations. However, activists acknowledge that their effectiveness depends on their ‘personal’ basis remaining publicly hidden. A former political activist who runs the national NGO he founded tells me in confidence: I now find some of my colleagues in quite a number of sectors who are outspoken and supportive speaking less because they don’t want to upset funders. You see in private [they are] telling me I should go on but in public not saying anything ... I know this NGO is led by so and so, I know they are supportive of me, but officially [...] they have to be seen as neutral, or they may even be saying things against what I am doing. But at a personal realm, when they meet me they say that ‘you go on’ and even give me information that I may not know. In a situation in which donor agendas are imagined to suppress dissent, personal relations make the existence of alternative perspectives possible. The philosopher Hannay argues that: ‘a public ... must somehow be made up of individuals properly called “private”, and that assumes that they are not under military law or tyranny’ (2005: 7). If the existence of a ‘public’ presumes the existence of private individuals and private interests, then in the face of state oppression and donor attempts to co-opt development agendas, personal relations become the very condition of private autonomy.

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Africa and the West Academic commentators have often imagined the density of affective personal relations as a specific feature of life in post-colonial Africa. Similar ideas feed into stereotyped notions of the differences between African and European development workers. Thus ‘Ghanaian’ or ‘African’ connectedness is frequently opposed to ‘European’ or ‘Western’ individualism. Personal relations are not simply emergent facts of social life; imagined differences between their nature and density index a related set of distinctions concerning the identities and capacities of Ghanaians and Europeans. Europeans working for international NGOs and donor organizations often see the degree to which people rely upon personal relations as a matter of being ‘Ghanaian’ or ‘European’. From this perspective the purported ‘weakness’ of Ghanaian civil society is related to the density of personal relations. By the same token, European development workers present their own absence of such relations as a strength. Tobias, the European head of a large donor-funded project (the focus of Chapter 6), relates his own ability to effectively undertake organizational reform to being ‘outside culture’. By contrast he describes a Ghanaian friend who works at the World Bank, suggesting that although he is ‘completely honest and straight’, he is ‘unable to escape his cultural context’: Even Ghanaians who don’t want to be corrupt can’t escape it. He is an Asante6 and so even though he wants to play it straight, people won’t let him. They come to him and say, ‘Hey, we’re both Asante, why don’t we do business?’ As in Bissell’s (1999) account of ex-pats in colonial Zanzibar, the imagination of Europeans as above a more parochial set of ‘local’ concerns accounts for their supposed capacity to represent the common good. At times Europeans themselves challenge this view. One European donor employee suggests that while they are critical of ‘neo-patrimonialism’ donors often use these mechanisms themselves: ‘You can do different things in Africa to what you can do at home. It makes Europeans into chiefs and a lot of people get carried away with that.’ More generally, Western development workers speak of the ‘personalization’ and ‘Africanization’ of international NGOs and donors as staff are forced to rely on ‘local mechanisms’ to get things done.

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Like Ghanaian NGO workers, Western development workers also recognize the more positive capacity for personal relations to curtail formal organizational processes. ‘Personal relations’ are seen as desirable in enabling agreements to be brokered behind the scenes that would not otherwise be possible. Western development workers talk of ‘corridor politics’, referring to the informal kinds of negotiation that are required to bring about desired institutional outcomes. In this light Ghanaians working for international development organizations sometimes comment on their own connectedness as a positive attribute. For example, a World Bank employee responsible for monitoring the government’s implementation of a large forestry project claims that his status as a Ghanaian sometimes makes it easier to do his job. Formally I am responsible to the sector manager in Washington, and the government of Ghana is responsible to me. That is meant to mean those from the chief director downwards, but being a Ghanaian I can still dialogue informally with the minister or deputy minister. From his perspective, personal relations are therefore effective in obviating various kinds of institutional difference in ways that can be positive for all concerned. Donor policy has tended to focus on the formalization of institutional procedure as a means to the ends of ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ and ‘good governance’. The rhetoric of such policies notwithstanding, donor employees privately acknowledge the significance of personal relations to their own work. If the capacity for personal relations to undermine formally acknowledged organizational practice is sometimes seen as a problem, at other times the pragmatic use of such relations is seen to present possibilities. The issue of when and whether these are legitimate largely depends on whether these are deployed in the service of ‘personal’ or ‘public’ interest. As Herzfeld has succinctly noted in relation to understandings of ‘corruption’, this ‘is very much a matter of where the observer is situated in relation to events’ (1992: 77).

The ambiguities of personal relations Some time ago, in a study of Sierra Leoneon Creole elites, Cohen (1981) argued that no society can be organized along purely rational bureaucratic lines. Public organizations and those that claim to speak in the name of the public good inevitably depend upon extensive informal dealings, secrecy and concealment. From the perspective of recent

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academic and donor discourses that construe the problems of Africa and its underdevelopment in terms of a lack of ‘good governance’, such relations appear problematic. Unlike the kinds of relations that donor projects attempt to foster, these are not ‘open’ and ‘transparent’, in the sense that inclusion or exclusion from them is not by recourse to a set of explicit and organizationally documented criteria. As this chapter demonstrates, at times NGO workers themselves highlight the problems of personal relations in terms that resonates with these donor critiques. NGO workers highlight their potential to curtail broader ideological and institutional goals and their capacity to undermine wider public interest. However, through taking seriously actors’ own evaluations of various forms of personal relation, this chapter reveals a more nuanced picture than the normative perspective of donors generally allows. Although NGO workers often recognize the need to coordinate collective interests through corporate organizations, they also recognize that certain universalistic functions are not best served by formal organizational procedure. Among other activities, the formation of NGO coalitions, attempts to gain funding and efforts to engage the government in dialogue often entail the utilization of personal relations without the exchange of formal documents and without recourse to formal institutional protocol. In this vein, a variety of NGO and donor personnel privately recognize that ‘undercover’ dealings are often carried out in the public interest, even if these cannot be publicly articulated. In particular, contacts and friendships derived through involvement in political activism are regarded as an important means to establish formal NGO networks and coalitions. Similarly, the very possibility of effective dialogue with government is seen to depend on knowing a particular minister personally. Although personal relations are therefore regarded as important in a variety of contexts, it is particularly significant to note the role these can play where public debate is suppressed. It is precisely their invisibility from a formal, bureaucratic perspective that has made them so effective against authoritarian governments. Similarly, in the face of powerful and sometimes hostile donors, ‘informal mechanisms’ are regarded as an effective means of coordinating dissent. In both cases, friendships and personal contacts are important not despite, but because of, their lack of ‘transparency’ (externally speaking). Friendships are regarded as ‘personal’ in the sense that they arise on the basis of deeply held beliefs and give rise to a range of specific emotional

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attachments. However as the understandings explored throughout this chapter demonstrate, they are not necessarily used to pursue personal gain. In other words, it should not be assumed that the existence of personal relations is coterminous with the pursuit of personal interests. Indeed Ghanaian NGO workers often use such mechanisms to pursue visions of social and economic development, even at the expense of their own personal interest, and often at the risk of considerable personal danger. While authors such as Bayart (1986) and Chabal and Daloz (1999) are right to highlight the potential capacity for personal relations to undermine public interest, Ghanaian NGO workers demonstrate how friendship may also be important in upholding it.

Maintaining independence Imagined as components of ‘civil society’, NGOs have often been defined in terms of an overarching commitment to organizational autonomy and independence (Bratton 1989). Such ideals emerge out of a longstanding tradition of political thought in which ‘civil society’ has been defined in contra-distinction to both family and the state. Thus Locke espoused the importance of a public sphere whose very ability to hold the government accountable derives from its autonomy from formal political structures and from the ability of actors to associate freely, unencumbered by external economic pressures (Taylor 1990). Commentators from a variety of disciplinary perspectives have debated the extent to which NGOs in fact conform to such ideals in the context of Africa. On the one hand, NGOs have been celebrated as potential bulwarks against oppressive authoritarian regimes (e.g. Gyimah-Boadi 1994; 1996, Harbeson 1994). On the other hand, a variety of accounts have highlighted how the autonomy of such organizations may be compromised. In particular these have focused on how oppressive state regimes have attempted to co-opt NGOs (e.g. Fowler 1991), on the role of neo-patrimonial relations in undermining formal organizational autonomy (Bayart 1986, Chabal and Daloz 1999), and on the extent to which donor funding compromises the ability for organizations to articulate their own ideals (Fischer 1997). Such critiques sound an important note of caution against the often uncritical acceptance of the idea that NGOs as embodiments of civil society represent a panacea for African development. Yet on both sides of the debate there is a danger that the institution is mistaken for the process (Igoe and Kelsall 2005). By contrast, an ethnographic perspective brings to light the complex dilemmas that NGO workers face, in

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the everyday practices and relationships required to uphold these virtues. While members of organizations such as CFA and CHD articulate a desire to build a stronger and more inclusive public sphere, they nonetheless recognize how such ideals are sometimes compromised by their own and others actions. Against a shared belief that personal and institutional autonomy should be maintained, members debate the role of particular practices and relationships in upholding or undermining these values. In this way, it is useful to think of NGO practices as a form of ‘compromised action’ (Feldman 2007). NGO workers face the paradox that ideological ends often conflict with the practical means required to bring these about.

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Part II Practice

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4 Local and Global

Early one morning I am travelling to one of the eight villages in which the Wenchi Natural Resource Management Project (WENREMP) is being implemented, accompanied by Stephen (Box 4.2), the project coordinator, and a civil servant from the Ministry of Farming and Agriculture (MOFA). The road is unpaved, heavily potholed and largely devoid of motorized traffic. Raised windows keep the dust out and the air conditioning in. After two hours driving, we arrive at Akenyakrom, parking the pickup under a shady mango tree before climbing out into the humid heat of the day. Small tsetse flies bite us incessantly and force us to borrow long-sleeved shirts from the villagers. ‘It’s a different world,’ Stephen remarks, alluding to what seems a self-evident gap between ‘our’ world of development and the ‘world’ of the village we have entered. But is this distinction as absolute as it at first appears? Shortly after we arrive, the village ‘action plan’ is brought out: brightly coloured bullet-pointed ‘objectives’ on a flip-chart page, the product of earlier meetings and discussions. As the meeting commences, familiar development tropes soon begin to emerge. The action plan is framed in terms that echo the many project documents I have read in the WENREMP offices in Wenchi, while the meeting takes the same form as those I have attended in other villages over the previous three months. The only remarkable feature of the visit, it seems, is that the MOFA expert is here to give ‘technical advice’. Akenyakrom is a fishing village on the Black Volta river. The project is intended to address the problem of declining fish stocks. One of the village elders describes how his ancestors came up the river from the South of Ghana when the fish were plentiful, but in recent years people have started to use fishpoisons so that now it is difficult to make a living. As we walk to view the fishpond, the MOFA expert explains the problems of the village in 105

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more technical language, suggesting that the fishpond will give them an ‘alternative livelihood’, reducing dependency on the river and leading to a more sustainable use of the land. ‘Lime is normally used to regulate the pH but in places like this, you need to work with what is locally available.’ At the pond, he takes the pH reading using a small testing kit and advises that manure will need to be added regularly. After less than an hour, we leave the village and return to the WENREMP office. In this chapter, I argue that the local/global contrast that frames many development interventions is not simply a problematic dualism to be discursively deconstructed, but an active achievement of development practice. Rejoining with the earlier arguments (Introduction and Chapter 1), I highlight the shortcomings of theories that see international development as a ‘global’ discourse that acts to perpetuate international inequality, and erase local difference. Rather than analytic concepts with explanatory value, I understand both ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ as the product of specific ordering practices (Green et al. 2005, Moore 2004). Returning to the vignette with which the chapter opens, some of the concrete ways in which this distinction is created become apparent. In the context of the WENREMP project, Stephen and the MOFA representative are in different ways defined as ‘experts’ with ‘technical knowledge’. To appreciate how they come to occupy this role, it is important to focus on the technical and material apparatus through which ‘expertise’ is performed. As ‘experts’, their role turns on their capacity to embody particular kinds of connections to people, things and ideas beyond the village itself. As Law (1994: chapter 7) argues of dualisms more generally, a distinction between ‘expert’ and ‘local’ is brought into being through materials and technologies that create particular kinds of order. Although this means that they can certainly not be dismissed as ‘mere abstractions’, it also means that they are often more contingent and precarious than a discursive analysis of this project might lead us to believe. From this perspective it is therefore important to recognize the role of apparently banal technologies in the enactment of development knowledge and expertise (Kelly forthcoming). For example, the pickup truck enables particular kinds of connection. This gives project staff a degree of geographical mobility that most of the inhabitants of the ‘beneficiary’ villages lack. Like the train described by DeCerteau, the pickup’s technical capabilities act to divide and connect things: ‘a tireless shifter producing changes in the relationships between immobile elements’

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(1984: 112). In this way it creates a ‘spectator’s distance’ on the world, making it possible to see things not visible to those limited to travelling by foot or bicycle. In paying attention to the technologies that contribute to the development expert’s ability to ‘enact’ (Mol 2002: 157) particular forms of expertise, it is also important to recognize the very real constraints that these impose. NGO workers remain bound by specific technologies and practices, which impose distinct limits on the connections they can make. Though the pickup is specifically designed for unpaved roads, the journey remains uncomfortable and time-consuming, and other more remote villages remain out of its reach. Moreover, since the project budget is tight, transport costs have to be closely monitored. Consequently visits are relatively infrequent, imposing restrictions on WENREMP’s knowledge of the community, as well as on their capacity to monitor their actions. While such an analysis enables an appreciation of the importance of mobility in the construction of development expertise (Green 2003), in practice development workers do not exist as abstract ‘experts’ but as people with particular kinds of expertise. In order to recognize the particularity of this knowledge, we need to recognize the material conditions that simultaneously enable and constrain different ways of knowing. The distinction enacted between the ‘specialist’ or ‘technical’ knowledge of development workers and the knowledge possessed by ‘local people’ at the ‘village level’ only exists as a product of practices involving particular associations of people and things. The ‘specialist’ perspective is not simply a product of a cognitively different held ‘worldview’; it inheres in the capacity they have to create particular kinds of connection between otherwise diverse people and things. The MOFA expert’s technical understanding of fishponds and the pH testing kit enable him to bring to the village understandings which those who excavated the pond did not have. As a form of ‘black box’ (Latour 1987: chapter 1) the testing kit itself embodies understandings which aggregate knowledge from many different times and places. Nonetheless, in his own assessment, the efficacy of this expertise is in many ways limited, not least by an inability to regularly monitor the pond. By contrast to the MOFA expert’s scientific expertise, the WENREMP representative’s authority derives from an ability to ‘know’ about beneficiary villages through various ‘participatory’ methods, techniques and approaches. As I explore in more detail in the next section, this knowledge derived from various acts of mapping and documentation

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through which the actions and beliefs of otherwise diverse members of beneficiary communities were made visible simultaneously and as a whole.

Participation The ‘participatory’ approach to development emerged in the early 1980s, envisaged as an alternative approach to the ‘top-down’, ‘technocratic’ approaches of mainstream development theory of the time. In particular advocates sought to challenge the Western centric perspective of development professionals and the corresponding ways in which ‘expertise’ justifies unequal political realities. As the concept has spread, the uses and meanings associated with it have proliferated (Chambers 1995, Cooke and Kothari 2001, Mosse 2001, Nelson and Wright 1995). While for some participation is seen as a set of practical tools and methods (specifically the use of visualization methods such as maps and matrices as discussed below), others see it more as a distinctive ‘philosophy’ or even a ‘way of life’. Advocates of participatory approaches point to the problematic way in which mainstream development approaches marginalize ‘local knowledge’, through assuming the superiority of ‘specialist knowledge’ (e.g. Chambers 1983, 1995). The ‘Village Participation in Rural Development Manual’, a widely used handbook, published by the World Bank, gives a sense of this idea: Service agency staff arrive in the villages with expertise but not with ready-made solutions. Rather they listen to the villagers. They also encourage villagers to think through their own problems. Each person has knowledge and ideas which can contribute to finding solutions to village problems. There is a proverb from Benin, ‘Knowledge, like fire, can be found at the home of one’s neighbour’. (Royal Institute of the Tropics and World Bank 2000: 18–19) Thus the participatory approach stresses the mutually complementary ways in which ‘experts’ and ‘villagers’ relate. Villagers are not regarded as part of the problem, but as active participants in the process of arriving at solutions. Like development workers, they have knowledge and experiences which are valuable and crucial to the successful implementation of any project. Drawing on this approach, the WENREMP project aims to make natural resource management strategies more sustainable, specifically

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through the reduction of the incidence of bushfire, by increasing awareness of its causes and consequences and through reducing dependency on slash and burn agriculture. In particular this entails an attempt to facilitate a shift towards ‘alternative livelihoods’ such as snail and grass cutter rearing, beekeeping and fish-farming. In line with the ‘participatory’ ideology of the project, WENREMP do not imagine their role as direct providers of inputs or funding. Rather four Ghanaian staff are employed to ‘build the capacity’ of their ‘local partner’ NGO, the Wenchi Farmers’ Credit Union (WEFCU). WEFCU in turn aim to build the capacity of the eight target communities through helping them to form organizations, identify development priorities and ultimately apply for funding from other sources. As such WENREMP see their role as that of ‘enablers’ and ‘facilitators’ of a process that will ideally come from ‘the communities themselves’. This sensitivity to ‘local ideas’ is often stressed in WENREMP project documents and meetings. During a project meeting, Yaa, the WENREMP project leader, outlines to other staff members the rationale behind the end of project review: ‘Normally projects are evaluated from outside. Experts come and they say how they think the project has worked from their outside perspective, but for this one, we wanted the impression of insiders.’ Rather than evaluate the project according to ‘external’ criteria, the process seeks to elucidate what community members ‘themselves thought’. As a means to this end, the review is to be carried out with the collaboration of ‘community members’: the ‘peer-review’ process will enable villagers from one place to be involved in the evaluation of the project in neighbouring villages. ‘It won’t be like some experts coming from Accra,’ Yaa explains ‘so people will feel free to talk and discuss what they want.’ Although ‘local knowledge’ is regarded as a ‘necessary’ part of the intervention, it is not seen to be sufficient to bring about successful development outcomes. Yaa describes the distinction between the knowledge of villagers and that of project staff, as she explains the methods that will be used in the review process: There are two angles. There is what the community see – their perceptions – but there is also our angle. It is our business to try and find out the underlying reasons based on the broader picture. The review process will go beyond the beliefs of particular villages to gain an understanding of the ‘broader picture’ and of ‘what was really going on’. The role of the development specialist is therefore

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complementary to that of the villagers. The beliefs of the community members, though important, are not by themselves taken as an indication of ‘actual causes’. These beliefs need to be set alongside the perceptions of other communities as well as statistics on rainfall patterns and bushfire incidence. In other words, the ‘specialist knowledge’ of development workers is regarded as a necessary and indispensable part of the process. It is ultimately only through this that the ‘truth’ of the situation can be gauged, and ‘perception’ separated from ‘reality’. In line with broader post-development critiques, critiques of ‘participatory’ approaches have drawn attention to their ‘hidden politics’. These critiques shed light on the potential for participatory approaches to re-inscribe the very hierarchies they seek to overcome. For example Mosse argues that, ‘the language of participation is co-opted from below as much as imposed from above’ (2001: 32). Similarly Cooke and Kothari contend that, ‘concern with the micro-level masks macro-level processes’ (Kothari 2001: 5). By framing their own analysis in terms of a micro/macro distinction, such critics have tended to overlook how participatory interventions themselves act to produce these differences of scale (Englund 2005). In practice, the assumed distinction between the ‘local knowledge’ of beneficiary communities and the ‘global knowledge’ of development workers is not an a priori given, but an achievement of the project. In particular, learning to understand the ‘local context’ is brought about through various forms of participatory research, collectively known as Participatory Rapid Appraisal. Prior to implementation of the main phase of the project, staff spend time gathering information on the population of villages and the ecological characteristics of their surrounding environment. These gather focus groups intended to reflect various ‘stakeholders’ in the community. In the idiom of ‘participation’, project staff are regarded as ‘facilitators’ of a process that emerges from the communities themselves. Demographic information is obtained by getting community members to collectively draw maps of their village and then ‘interviewing the map’ to elicit who lives in each house. ‘Resource maps’ are similarly obtained through a process in which ‘relevant stakeholders’ (usually fishermen, hunters and farmers) are given flip-chart paper and marker pens to indicate the location of the key natural resources they depend upon. Project staff also ‘facilitate’ the collection of information on the nature of existing problems. Using cards, selected members of the communities are asked to write down the main issues faced by the

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community before arranging these through a process of negotiation into ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. Since the role of project staff is not to bring knowledge to the village, but simply to ‘facilitate’ this, their own ‘expertise’ is imagined as a particular mode of elicitation rather than as a canon of received knowledge. Being a good facilitator is seen in terms of the capacity to make knowledge and relations appear in a certain form. In particular project staff attempt to ensure that the process is ‘participatory’, through making explicit attempts to elicit contributions from less vocal members of the groups. They explicitly recognize that this entails a contradiction in so far as ‘participatory’ ideals of equality are at a tangent to ‘local’ understandings that deference and respect should be accorded to community elders. Facilitators link ‘inclusiveness’ to language, imagining their own ability to communicate in twi as a particular ‘skill’. Beyond this, they also speak of a need to conform to the more ‘traditional’ and ‘correct’ twi, contrasting this with their own more ‘direct’ speech. In a related way the capacity to conform to cultural expectations, is also explicitly valorized. Project staff elucidate to me the Akan importance of formal greetings (always shaking hands from right to left), of a formal statement of one’s ‘mission’ and of the commencement of meetings with prayers. By the same token the regular use of ‘energizers’ are seen as an important means of ensuring that community members remain ‘engaged’. In various ways, facilitators therefore direct attention to the form of these meetings in order to ensure the efficacy of their content. Good information is not that which is objectively ‘true’, but that which most accurately represents ‘local knowledge’. Ensuring that maps and diagrams represent people’s views means ensuring that these are elicited in a participatory manner. Accordingly, the form of project meetings anticipates future practices of documentation (Riles 2001, 2006a, 2006b). Maps and diagrams do not simply record the outcome of discussions and debates; meetings are oriented from the start in relation to particular documentary forms. Project staff recognize that in practice these participatory ideals are often hard to uphold. In terms that resonate with a number of the academic critiques of participatory approaches, they speak of the difficulties of ‘connecting’. While sometimes this is seen as a problem of ‘cultural difference’, at other times it is seen as a function of the inherent hierarchy entailed in the relationship. WENREMP and WEFCU staff therefore make explicit their attempts to be ‘more humble’. As well as attempting to effect appropriate demeanour, some speak of the

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desirability of ‘erasing difference’ through the adoption of appropriate dress and through eschewing ostentatious displays of wealth. In the representations that result from these practices, ‘the community’ is objectified in undifferentiated terms that erase the selective nature of different individual’s contributions (Mosse 2001, 2005a). However, in the process of eliciting views, ideas of ‘the community’ provide the ground against which facilitators judge the extent to which focus groups are ‘representative’. The idea that ‘the community’ can be objectified in undifferentiated terms provokes reflection and critical debate as to the social make-up of particular places and the differences of perspective that would need to be solicited. The participatory approach therefore provides an ideal against which project staff assess their own and others’ actions. Acknowledgement that the approach is difficult to implement does not lead people to reject it outright. Rather it leads them to redouble their efforts to improve the mechanisms by which ‘local knowledge’ is obtained. Following these ideals creates a compatibility between the utterances of different people, that allows for comparability between different places. Maps and diagrams objectify ‘the community’ in a holistic and aggregated sense. Since the ‘local knowledge’ of each community is documented through the same basic forms, project staff are able to create comparisons and connections and thereby discern trends at a wider ‘regional’ scale. If the ‘expertise’ of project staff partly inheres in their capacity to elicit knowledge through conventional forms, it also lies in the ability to surmise patterns and trends at this more abstract level. The forms of standardization required to bring about these kinds of abstraction have been criticized for the corresponding ‘objectification’ of beneficiary communities (Englund 2006, Henkel and Stirrat 2001, Kothari 2001). Similar criticisms are voiced by project staff, who on occasion acknowledge a troubling propensity for documentary practices to conceal the very kinds of social and cultural difference they hope to make apparent. Moreover they acknowledged the potential for ‘distortion’ – such as when information is collected too rapidly or insufficient views are obtained. Yet if such abstractions are in certain respects problematic, this should not blind us to their potential to yield new insight. As with the kinds of standardization that underpin more conventional scientific practice (Haraway 1997, Latour 1987, 1993), these development practices act to materialize knowledge that did not previously exist. Though this knowledge is often acknowledged to be imperfect, it nonetheless creates a workable basis for the project’s own activities. In

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particular it creates understanding of the different problems and issues that lead groups to engage in short-term subsistence strategies associated with bushfire – a phenomenon that farmers, academics (Amanor 2002) and development workers alike acknowledge to have hugely negative economic and environmental problems throughout the region. In addition such documentation also creates the potential for strategies to overcome these problems by making visible the existence (or lack) of various community-based organizations. Members of beneficiary communities who take part in the meetings that give rise to these documents also remark on their value. In particular, community elders point to the role of these maps in enabling them to re-perceive the problems and issues that the community faces. Moreover participants highlight how the very process of constructing these documents is itself productive of new and valuable relationships. Members of beneficiary communities are certainly not uniform in their praise for the project, pointing in particular to the lack of actual resources or input. Nonetheless, the positive impact of WENREMP is widely spoken of in terms of the ‘unity’ it has created. Henkel and Stirrat (2001: 181) argue that, in so far as participatory maps already frame what can and cannot be represented, they open up the local to a global view. If development expertise inheres in the capacity to aggregate different ‘local situations’, this only becomes possible through these cartographic and bureaucratic processes. To claim that these open up ‘the local’ to ‘the global’, however, is already to assume the difference of view that these create. As the foregoing analysis reveals, participatory practices in fact create a distinction between ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of knowledge. Thus it is not the case that ‘local’ knowledge is constructed according to ‘global’ conventions. Both ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ are contingent outcomes of specific project activities. Participatory approaches have come in for widespread criticism from development practitioners and academics alike. Mainstream critiques have frequently taken the form of what Cooke and Kothari term ‘methodological revisionism’ (2001: 2). A more fundamental challenge comes from those who have attempted to deconstruct the values and principles upon which such methodologies are founded. From an anthropological perspective, Mosse suggests: ‘What is read or presented as “local knowledge” is a construct of the planning context, behind which is concealed a complex micro-politics of knowledge production and use’ (2001: 19, brackets omitted). In a similar vein, Cooke and Kothari suggest that in assuming the existence of ‘multiple realities’ (2001: 12), the

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participatory approach conceals the extent to which development professionals are complicit in the construction of these realities. These approaches provide an important corrective to the often unthinking adoption of participatory approaches, highlighting the potential for these to perpetuate inequality and re-inscribe the privileged position of development elites. At one level my analysis joins with these critiques in drawing attention to the complex relationships and practices that underpin these interventions. However, the polemic nature of many of these critiques has led to a failure to ask in a sufficiently nuanced way what these practices actually accomplish (Jensen and Winthereik forthcoming). Assuming these discourses create homogenously oppressive effects directs attention away from the surprising effects these sometimes produce and even to their relative lack of effect in achieving their aims. As we have seen, project staff themselves acknowledge the difficulty of their predicament in terms of the hierarchical relationships that frame their interactions with communities. Some project staff derive pleasure and satisfaction from the wealth and respect that their role as development workers affords (cf. Englund 2006: chapter 4). However this should not be mistaken for the more general point that participatory approaches simply re-inscribe existing hierarchies. Even if these approaches are not always successful in their own terms, they lead to new forms of relationship and practice. While it would be wrong to consider participatory forms of documentation and mapping as inherently benign (as advocates of participatory approaches have certainly been guilty of doing), it seems equally problematic to assume that their outcomes are necessarily negative. If the participatory approach is not viewed as a singular set of processes but rather as an assemblage of plural and sometimes contradictory practices a rather more nuanced understanding emerges. In glossing their own understandings as ‘global’, project staff sometimes erase the contingency of their own practices. At times this idea of ‘global’ knowledge provides the rationale for dismissing the ostensibly more restricted ‘local’ knowledge of villagers. Nonetheless ideas of the importance of ‘local knowledge’ provide the impetus for critical reflection and intervention, even to the extent that this entails a reified conception of ‘beneficiary communities’. Project staff invoke ‘local knowledge’ in drawing attention to the limits of their own knowledge, and community members sometimes frame criticisms of the project in similar terms. In this way, ideas of ‘the local’ are invoked in pointing to various overlooked complexities in the project design.

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The Ghana Participatory Development Network As part of the WENREMP project’s commitment to ‘participation’, Yaa, the project coordinator, acts as secretary for the Ghana Participatory Development Network (PADNET). The network is composed of both Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian members involved in a wide range of activities and types of organization. A brochure produced by the network outlines the organization’s mission, to ‘share insights, skills, best practices and lessons learnt to enhance participation as a vehicle for social political and economic change’. Prominent among the network founders are a number of former members of the Young Catholic Movement and former political activists (see Chapter 1). While development concepts of ‘participation’ are explicitly secular,1 continuities are asserted between the participatory approach and the ideologies of Catholic liberation theology. Similarly, former activists connect the concept of ‘participation’ to the ‘mass participation’, advocated by the left-wing political organizations they belonged to in the early 1980s. Participatory ideologies therefore take on specific resonances in the context of a longer history of activism. To formally inaugurate the network, a number of events are planned to generate interest and awareness. As an organization interested in ‘participation’, members of the network assert that the events should be ‘as inclusive as possible’. The organization of these events is devolved to network members in the relevant ‘zones’. This is imagined to contribute to ‘local sensitivity’. Although aimed at a ‘cross-section of people’, network members agree that priority should be given to ‘the grass-roots’. The main inaugural events take place in Dalun, a small regional capital in the North of Ghana. Network members see this ‘making a statement’, a point subsequently elaborated in the inauguration report: It was fitting and of symbolic importance, that PADNET was inaugurated not in Accra, not in Kumasi, not in Tamale even, but in Dalun, in the periphery, as a deliberate statement, putting the last first. Despite this desire to be locally responsive, network members also recognize the importance of wider visibility. Charles (Box 4.1), one of the network’s founders, explains the importance of holding events in the capital, suggesting that this will ‘put the network on the map’, making donors and other NGOs aware of it. Locality is therefore symbolically

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Box 4.1 Charles I came from a relatively humble background but my father believed in the importance of education and managed to scrimp and save to send me to Mfantsipim, one of the country’s elite boarding schools. In 1979 I went to the University of Ghana, where I read Politics. Many of the lecturers at the time were Marxists, and that really helped to shape my social consciousness. As an undergraduate I became heavily involved in the Young Catholic Movement, and that also brought me into contact with many of the leaders of the student movement. When Rawlings first came to power, I supported him. It seemed that there were a lot of resonances between the things he was talking about and the things we were talking and reading about – liberation theology and all of that. After graduating, I took a job as the national coordinator for the Young Christian Students, before starting work coordinating a development project at the National Service. I worked very closely with Simon [Box 1.3], another Young Catholic, who was later to play a very prominent role in the NGO sector. At the same time I was also involved in the NGO CHD, which was another practical way of trying to realize the ideas we’d been talking about as students and in the Young Catholic Movement. Then in 1989, I took a job as a field officer for an international NGO. Through that I met the woman who was to become my wife. In 1993 we both moved to the UK, which was where she originally came from. I did an MA in Development Studies and then we both returned to Ghana. At that stage CHD was slightly lacking direction. When I returned in 1994 I was the only full-time employee. But little by little the organization expanded and by 1999 it had become one of the largest national NGOs with quite a lot of influence. But over time I started to feel that the organization needed new direction and I also felt I needed a new challenge. I left to set up a development consultancy along with my wife. The idea of that was to do something that was socially progressive, but really with the aim of being able to support the other activities we wanted to pursue. So the consultancy has provided us with a vehicle to do other things.

important. Charles suggests that Dalun, a small town in the North, will ‘make a statement’ about the network’s philosophy of inclusiveness and its ‘grass-roots’ nature. By the same token he suggests that Accra, the capital city, affords proximity to international donors and the government. The location of the inaugural events therefore symbolizes the network’s ‘local sensitivity’, while at the same time ensuring ‘wider visibility’. This local/global duality is also played out within each of the events. At the main inaugural event at Dalun, the Dalun Lana (chief of Dalun) gives a speech in which he relays the positive experiences of

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the community with the participatory approach to development. The speech is made in Dagaarti, a language from the North of Ghana that few of the mostly southern audience understand. As network members explain, the speech is important less for what he says and more for the fact he is there to say it. His presence is taken to symbolize the inclusion of the ‘local community’ in the events. Other speeches, by contrast, make explicit the network’s connections and relationships beyond the locale. The northern regional minister talks of the importance of ‘participation’ in the wider ‘national context’ of Ghana. His appearance is fleeting but is enough to guarantee the presence of a national television crew. Similarly, the attendance of Robert Chambers, a prominent British academic and ‘pioneer’ of participatory methodologies, makes evident the ‘global’ connections of the network. Documentation of the events is seen as an important means by which visibility beyond Ghana is achieved. By documenting the modus operandi of the events, network members highlight the capacity for knowledge to be shared with other organizations and networks – in Ghana and beyond. Network members describe the capacity of such documents to facilitate ‘lesson learning’, the dissemination of ‘best practice’, and to increase recognition of the network. During my time at PADNET I am given responsibility for turning these reports into a document, intended to be published as a brochure, which, as one of the founder members puts it, ‘will be able to circulate widely’. I am told that many of the workshop reports are written in ‘Ghanaian English’, which people in other parts of the world may not be able to understand. A British member of the Network explains: ‘This [report] is going to go outside Ghana – to the outside world – so it needs to be able to travel.’ Her explanation makes evident a more generally remarked upon distinction between forms of language that conform to a ‘global’ aesthetic, and ‘local’ or ‘Ghanaian’ forms that lie outside of this. In practice the simultaneous achievement of ‘global visibility’ and ‘local sensitivity’ is not always successful. The inauguration events are filmed with the intention of making a video to publicize the network and to document the ‘innovative’ participatory organization of the events. To many of the network members’ evident dismay, however, the video, shot by a private company, is edited in a way that does not reproduce the combination of ‘local’ and global’ elements in the exacting aesthetic required. As I watch the first cut with

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the executive committee, people point out the lack of ‘local context’ and the fact that ‘all the places seem the same’. What is required, they suggest, are shots that will tell people where the events took place – a problem that is finally resolved by the use of library clips of ‘village life’. Similarly, objections are raised that there are ‘too many shots of white people’, undermining the image of the network as ‘Ghanaian’. In this way scales and levels are evoked through processes of documentation and filming, as well as through the geographical location of events. On the surface, the vision seems to be one of ‘hierarchical encompassment’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), in which ‘the local’ is contained within ‘the global’. However, in practice this opposition does not neatly delimit distinct places or groups of people. Both ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ are produced through practices and relationships which themselves elude this opposition.

Performing identity Concepts of the ‘local’ are used to refer to political and social relationships far less bounded than the terms suggest (Cooper and Packard 1997b: 18). Village elders in the communities in which WENREMP work at times strategically erase their connections to the wider world. The archaeologist Stahl notes that in the Wenchi district in which the project is based, ‘people operate simultaneously in overlapping landscapes of various scale that link town and country, city and prairie, coast and interior’ (2001: 43). Similarly the anthropologists Dunn and Robertson (1973) describe the extent of geographical mobility in the region, noting how cola traders come and go, farmers send their children to schools throughout Ghana, and modern communications facilitate travel to and awareness of the wider world. At times resistance to the WENREMP project takes the form of dissolution or non-recognition of the local/global dichotomy that project activities engender. For example, pleas for help are sometimes voiced in the context of pre-existing social or kin relations to project staff. Villagers seek to reposition themselves from the generic category of ‘beneficiaries’ as members of an undifferentiated ‘community’, through asserting more personal claims. Attempts by project staff to elicit ‘local opinion’ are also sometimes frustrated by non-participation in focus groups and mapping exercises.

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In certain moments project ‘beneficiaries’ recognize the strategic possibilities of speaking from the perspective of ‘the local’. For example, communities use the project’s own rhetoric to highlight project failings. During meetings villagers sometimes highlight the marginalization of their ‘local knowledge’. By the same token, those elders and chiefs most frequently included in meetings consolidate their status, identity and ultimately power by positioning themselves as repositories for the kind of ‘local knowledge’ the project sought. For project employees an ability to convincingly speak from a ‘local perspective’ similarly confers legitimacy, and is used in pointing to the limitations of wider ‘global’ discourses of development. These kinds of ‘local’ identities are often highlighted in the context of meetings and workshops that project staff attend in other parts of the country. During these events, WEFCU and WENREMP staff explicitly speak of their origins in ‘the village’, and frame contributions to discussions in terms of the knowledge and experience this gives rise to. Development practitioners also perform a ‘local’ identity in less explicit ways. For example project staff wear ‘local’ clothes – men commonly dressing in colourful batik and tie-dyed shirts or in smocks; women in ‘kabas’. Similarly, during workshop buffets Ghanaian development workers frequently eschew the ‘Western’ option in favour of ‘local’ Ghanaian dishes such as fufu and kenkey. The ‘local’ identity asserted in these contexts is not simply a default category; as much as ‘the global’, it is constructed through various forms of material and discursive performance. Ferguson (1999: chapter 3) elucidates a model in which both ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘local’ are viewed as distinct ‘styles’ produced by members of a socially unified group. In the context of urban mine-workers in the Zambian copperbelt, he illustrates how some choose to foreground a ‘rural’ identity through practices such as drinking locally brewed beer, wearing local garments and speaking local languages. By contrast he describes how others foreground a ‘cosmopolitan’ identity, for example, by speaking English and wearing ‘Western’ clothes. Ferguson notes how these different ‘styles’ do not simply reflect cultural differences, but make differences evident within a socially unified group. Similarly, Ghanaian NGO workers employ the opposition between ‘local’ and ‘global’ relationally to make a variety of contextual distinctions, and to perform a range of shifting identities. Now in his early 30s, Stephen (Box 4.2) works as a WENREMP project officer. His ‘home

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Box 4.2 Stephen When I was very young my parents split up and my mother returned to her village in Wenchi District. I went to live with my father’s brother, who had six children of his own. And I was underfed. We ate together in the same pot and the food was not so much ... Uniform for school, clothes, footwear, I could not get it. After secondary school I passed the sixth form exam. My family refused to support me but I managed to find an aunt to stay with and with a scholarship to cover my fees I managed to get through, working to cover my expenses. It was here that my interest in development started. With my education I got interested in education in the community. There were other people who were also trying to help. We started working on a secondary school. I knew it would be possible for more people in the community to go if we had one in the community. So I went to do my National Service after sixth form in the secondary school. The National Service is supposed to be a year but after the year’s service I still had to stay because there were no teachers – even though I wasn’t paid. After National Service, I gained a place to study at Legon University. Up to that point I had been drinking quite heavily but all that changed on a trip back to my village. I was drunk and saw this beautiful lady carrying some yams. I discovered that she liked me but she refused to sleep with me. She said it was against God’s teaching. I did Bible knowledge in secondary school and I remembered this scripture from the book of Mark came back to me, like somebody speaking to me. From that day I have never tasted alcohol. It’s like somebody just lifted it from me. When I got back, I wanted to change my course. I decided I can’t do law in Ghana looking at the level of corruption. I became a person who could speak the truth, defend what is right. And I said, if I’m going to do this in Ghana, am I going to be a successful lawyer? So I changed to political sciences which had a big influence – reading about all the social theories and development and all those things, it really put a lot of things in perspective. After graduating, I came back here and was voted in as the local assembly man. But at the same time I managed to get a scholarship to study for a Master’s in Development Studies in The Hague. I really learnt a lot from that but I also started to see some of the limits of Western development – that it’s not just material, it’s holistic: social, material, physical, psychological. When I returned I felt an obligation to the people who elected me. So I started work again in the secondary school as well as helping with mother tongue Bible translation. I know no single person can change Ghana in a moment. But you can sincerely and honestly contribute what you can. The work was unpaid but after a while working here I was able to get a job as a project officer for an international NGO working in the community. So this seemed like an opportunity to still be around my people and serve my purpose but also make some money.

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town’ (Manuh 2003, Middleton 1979), and the place he grew up, is one of the villages in which the WENREMP project operates. Often we stop at his mother’s house on the way back from a meeting in one of the nearby villages – to drop off provisions such as kerosene, and to pick up yams to take back to the town. Sometimes we stop to eat and socialize, talking to his relatives. Frequent topics of conversation are family, the farm and the politics of the village. In such moments his ‘specialist knowledge’ is largely irrelevant, supplanted by the various roles and obligations he has with friends and relatives in the village. Although his job as a well-paid development professional gives him status within the village, his identity is never understood in these contexts as ‘global’. Rather his wealth and education lead people to relate to him as a ‘big man’ (McCaskie 1995, Price 1974). If this entails certain forms of respect, it also entails the expectation of certain social, financial and material obligations. These expectations give rise to ambiguous and sometimes uncomfortable feelings. At times Stephen speaks of his ‘local’ connections and his relationship to the village. He acknowledges that his education and job mean that many people from the village see him as being ‘different’ to them. Because he has travelled abroad and been to university, many of the people he went to school with are jealous and expect favours. Despite this he tries to ‘minimize the gap’. On one occasion he returned from an extended period of study in Amsterdam: When I came back, the next day I went to the farm. I tried to show people it is not degrading to go to the farm. I try to be as simple as I can. You know, I go to everybody if they see me in the village. I don’t create a difference. More generally he suggests that similarities to friends and relatives in the village, and a corresponding sense of ‘rootedness’, give rise to ongoing moral ‘commitment’. At other times, however, he plays down these ‘local’ relations and connections, locating himself as a part of a wider cosmopolitan world. Explaining to me the problems of ‘tribalism’ in his village, he is careful to place himself outside these kinds of affiliation, choosing instead the more universal language of human rights. In these terms he tells me about a boy he helped to go to school, a stranger he met in the lorry park, who needed the fees to enable him to write an exam. The boy was going back to the village to beg the money from his father. Knowing that the father would not be able to pay, he gave him the

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money himself: He’s from an enemy village. You know, from a place where they are trying to kill my people. But I know no barriers. All humans are humans to me. I respect everybody as equal. Stephen locates himself beyond the ‘parochialism’ and ‘divisiveness’ of family and ethnic affiliations, in so far as these are seen to stand for ‘parochialism’ and ‘divisiveness’. Through narrating his life, Stephen brings into view different kinds of connections and relationships in different moments. As Edwards (1998) argues, belonging to a locality is not always relevant: different elements of identity may be brought to the fore or suspended at different times. In a discussion of identity in a town in Northern England, she argues that some people foreground locality while others suspend such connections through the evocation of extra-local elements. Similarly, development workers’ narratives of belonging variously evoke and erase different kinds of connection in contextually asserting different identities. Castells (1996: 411–418) describes processes by which ‘non-local’ identities form as elite groups become increasingly connected through ‘global networks’. Consequently they are disconnected from ‘local populations’, who, from the perspective of these global networks of capital, are functionally unnecessary. These elites form their own society and constitute symbolically secluded communities. Though not necessarily sociologically connected, they occupy a relatively unified symbolic environment. Evinced in post-modern architecture, airport lounges and international hotels, their effect, he suggests, is to erase the historical specificity of particular locales. At the same time, those outside of the ‘network society’ become isolated and marginalized. This isolated majority continue to perceive space as ‘place-based’, defined as a condition in which form, function and meaning are selfcontained within the boundaries of physical contiguity. The result, he concludes, is ‘structural schizophrenia’ between two increasingly detached and unrelated logics. A similar opposition informs Hannerz’s (1992) description of the ‘global ecumene’: ‘cosmopolitans’ joined by networks to divergent cultural forms are increasingly set apart from ‘locals’, who remain in networks informed by a single cultural logic. Related arguments have been made in relation to development professionals. For example, Mawdsley et al. suggest that development workers belong to an ‘emergent transnational community’ (2002: 1), arguing

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that their attachments to global forms of knowledge and identity are greater than those to the people in the specific places in which they live. In a similar vein Green (2003), following Auge, describes development projects as ‘non-places’, elucidating how project professionals are increasingly detached from the social relations of ‘anthropological place’. Although these theories shed light on the problematic detachment of development professionals from the communities they are ostensibly intended to help, they gloss important complexities. The opposition of these elites to a ‘place-based’ majority obscures the extent to which even those in relatively poor and remote places remain, in Charles Piot’s (1999) terms, ‘remotely global’. Moreover, while development workers at times occupy spaces that conform to globally recognizable templates, many also retain significant connections to places that conform to different social and cultural logics. In practice the opposition between ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of identity does not lead to ‘structural schizophrenia’ (Castells 1996: 417); rather, different people variously assert ‘local’ and ‘global’ identities according to context. Rather than structurally opposed logics, ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ constitute situationally defined identities among heterogeneous but overlapping groups of people.

‘Local’ and ‘global’ knowledge From a range of disciplinary perspectives, scholars have argued that paradoxically, in the face of donor rhetoric of ‘participation’ and ‘grass-roots empowerment’, ‘local’ kinds of knowledge are becoming more rather than less marginalized. In this vein, Mawdsley et al. assert that: Despite diverse social, cultural, political and economic settings, we find that NGOs working in very different environments around the world are frequently talking the same language and following very similar development agendas: instead of a diverse heterogeneous mix of projects ideas and practices, which are locally derived and designed, we see powerful waves of global development fashions sweeping everything before them. (2002: 1) Their book goes on to elucidate some of the reasons for this, locating them, on the one hand, in ‘new technologies’ such as the Internet and, on the other, in the rise of a ‘donor created, donor-led system’.

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Development knowledge, in other words, is a conduit of globalization, leading to a situation in which: NGO fieldworkers in Ghana may now hold more ideas in common with similar field workers in Mexico than with their local business communities or their own national governments. (2002: 6) Starting from the premise of a socially, culturally and politically heterogeneous world, globalization is imagined in this account as a recent historical rupture whose effect is to blur many of the distinctions and certainties of a former age. The spread of information and knowledge is linked to the spread of power, such that recent developments within the NGO sector appear to increase the power or hegemony of the West. In the face of this, their collective plea is for greater sensitivity to ‘local agendas’ and ‘local knowledge’. ‘Local’ in this view is synonymous with specificity, particularity and sensitivity. Yet this conflation of the ‘local’ with the specific is misleading. The celebration of ‘the local’ as a bulwark against ‘global oppression’ overlooks the extent to which ideas of ‘the local’ are themselves frequently framed in globally recognizable terms. In the context of ‘participatory’ approaches to development, ‘local knowledge’ emerges as an outcome of complex encounters involving beneficiary communities and development professionals, each in different ways tied into much broader personal and institutional networks. If the ‘local’ takes the universally recognizable form of international development practice, it cannot be pitted against the homogenization of ‘globalization’ in the way that many scholars have imagined. On the other hand, if ‘global knowledge’ is also an outcome of development practice, it is important to recognize how such ideas are sustained by the specific practices of particular people in particular places. Rather than imagining a singular process of ‘globalization’, it might be more productive to think of ‘the global’ as a ‘contested universal’ (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2005: chapter 3). In practice, people use ideas of ‘the global’ both to assert authority and contest power. My suggestion is that seemingly universal forms are put to specific ends, just as ‘the global’ emerges as a product of particular practices. It is not simply that ‘global development’ knowledge is refracted in terms of ‘local’ ‘counter-tendencies’ (Arce and Long 2000); development is itself a space in which shifting identities and diverse forms of knowledge are assembled and reformulated. If the result sometimes

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re-inscribes existing inequality, development practice nonetheless entails the possibility for social, political and economic transformation. What form that transformation should take and whether or not it is successful will always be a matter of perspective. What I hope this chapter shows is that many of those debates are themselves internal to development practice.

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5 Indigenous and Western

Within development circles in Ghana, the concept of ‘indigenous knowledge’ has gained increasing currency over the past decade, as it has in many other parts of the world (Ellen and Harris 2000). Often explicitly related to the ‘participatory’ approach, advocates present the approach as a way of bringing about development while remaining sensitive to cultural differences and the specific wishes of particular ‘local communities’ (Blunt and Warren 1996). As against ‘technocratic’ and ‘top-down’ approaches, this alternative focus requires questioning the ‘Western’ assumptions with which development workers start (Uphoff 1996). The development concept of indigenous knowledge originally emerged in Latin America (Agrawal 1995) and later spread to South Asia (Baviskar 2000), where it has tended to be seen as related to (or even synonymous with) knowledge about the environment. By contrast in Ghana the term has more often been applied to the kinds of political systems and beliefs that accompany the various forms of chieftaincy existing within the country. Extending the approach adopted in the previous chapter, this chapter examines how the ideas and practices associated with the approach hold together a diverse range of contexts and actors, even while these are undercut by radical differences, disjunctures and misunderstandings. In this vein the chapter focuses on the various social, ideological and political contexts that ideas of ‘indigenous knowledge’ structure. As anthropologists have noted elsewhere (Baviskar 2000, Dove 2000, Knight 2000, Li 2000), the loose definition of ‘indigenous knowledge’ by international development donors enables the extension of the term to a diverse range of people. At the same time, the considerable financial resources made available by donors provide an incentive for people 126

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to interpolate such ideas into their own thought and practice. In this context indigenous knowledge provides an idiom in which a range of pre-existing claims and identities are articulated and transformed (Li 2000: 121). In Ghana, various people including European and Ghanaian development workers and members of traditional authorities have used the discourses, resources and forums that have accompanied donor interest to articulate a range of views. Such discourses are underpinned by an opposition between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’. Anthropologists and other social scientists have been right to highlight the problematic way in which this dichotomy simplifies the social realities it is used to describe (e.g. Agrawal 1995, Dove 2000, Ellen and Harris 2000). However, in critically dismissing the opposition, these approaches have also tended to overlook how such ideas become meaningful to actors in ways that are not so easily dismissed. In this vein the chapter focuses on how these ideas become meaningful and significant in the context of actual social encounters (Yarrow 2008b). In doing so it seeks to make evident social complexities and that more narrowly discursive readings have overlooked.

Indigenous knowledge and development Over the course of 2003, the Indigenous Knowledge Development Centre (IKDC), a Ghanaian NGO, convenes a series of workshops with the aim of ‘enhancing knowledge and awareness of indigenous knowledge within development’. Funded by an international NGO, these workshops are intended to bring together key stakeholders, including donors, NGOs and ‘traditional authorities’, to discuss how indigenous knowledge can be used as the basis for various development interventions.1 A related aim is to build relationships between NGOs and traditional authorities. During these events, development workers use discourses of indigenous knowledge to re-describe relationships between traditional authorities and the government. In elucidating the importance of indigenous knowledge in development, speakers and participants at these events highlight how political and economic problems in Ghana have resulted from the uncritical and insensitive imposition of ‘Western’ beliefs and values. In particular, criticism focuses on the limitations of ‘Western’ systems of governance in terms of a lack of popular legitimacy and acceptance. Such criticisms, generally made by Ghanaian elites, leverage the language of ‘indigenous knowledge’ to give renewed voice to pre-existing and

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widespread concerns about government legitimacy and accountability. Yet an appreciation of indigenous knowledge is not regarded as sufficient for successful development by itself. Rather, participants stress the need to combine this with ‘Western knowledge’, talking of the need for ‘synergy’. Such ideas are graphically illustrated during one workshop presentation, through the image of a Shona woman from Zimbabwe. A Ghanaian academic and development consultant describes this woman as wearing a ‘British hat’, a ‘Swiss watch’ and a ‘traditional Shona cloth’, exemplifying the challenge faced by development practitioners: ‘How can we successfully combine all these different elements so that the indigenous and foreign elements are working together in harmony?’ Assuming ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ knowledge to be distinct, discussion focuses on the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ attributes of both. During a later workshop in the series, Sulley (Box 5.1), a development worker employed by the international NGO sponsoring the event, talks of his own experience of his village in the North. He suggests that the system there is highly democratic and open: ‘I come from a tribe [where] ... we have these clan leaders and for us they are the chiefs. What we don’t have is somebody sitting overall and saying that I am the boss of all I survey.’ Samuel, an employee of the NGO IKDC, describes the system in his own village in terms of a similar opposition, explaining how the election of village elders constitutes a fairer and more open system of governance than Western democracy: All the candidates have to stand under different trees, and then the village members go and stand next to the one they prefer. If there isn’t consensus then people just talk until there is [...]. It’s like everybody present is a returning officer [...]. The system is much more open, because people can see that nothing underhand is happening. If the ‘Western’ system is ‘unfair’ and ‘authoritarian’ then the indigenous system, by contrast, is ‘open’ and ‘democratic’. In attempting to locate areas of ‘synergy’ between these ostensibly opposed political systems, such discussions also highlight the need to think more critically about the problems associated with the ‘indigenous system’. Throughout these meetings it is frequently suggested that traditional authorities conceal the ways in which the institution operates, in order to buttress their positions of power. If knowledge about indigenous institutions was better documented, NGO workers suggest, villagers could better hold them to account. During one of these meetings,

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Box 5.1 Sulley I grew up in the Upper East region. My father was a military policeman, which meant that as a child we had a better standard of living than most I was growing up with. But conditions in the North were difficult at the time. Being confronted with poverty day in, day out, even if you are not very poor yourself, made you question certain things. In 1980 I went to the University of Ghana where I read Accountancy. Many of my friends were involved in student activism and through that I also got involved in the Leftist tendency within the National Union of Ghana Students. And I was also quite active in the JFM. During my second year I was elected president of the Student Representative Council, a position I held when Rawlings came to power in 1981. The SRC supported the regime and supported the coup. It seemed we had similar ideas about what was wrong with society – corruption, greed, short-sightedness – and how it could be put right. After the coup I became regional coordinator of the greater Accra taskforce. In that capacity I oversaw the suspension of university and the decision to send students to help in communities. But my active involvement in student politics ended quite suddenly when my father died. Suddenly I was responsible for the family. I had to return to the North and take a pretty mundane job at a government ministry – just something to support the family. At that time a friend was setting up a service NGO and he wanted me to be involved. It was absolutely what I wanted to do but unfortunately it just wasn’t feasible. But all the while I was working at the ministry I kept up with friends from the student movement – meeting in study groups and things like that – and I kept up my interest in politics. In 1994 I managed to get a job as administrator at an international NGO. It was initially fairly mundane stuff but it allowed me to deepen my interest in development issues, to make some good contacts and to get some good experience. Following promotion to Programme Coordinator, I took a job at another international NGO as Coordinator of its Northern programme. That’s where I’m working now. Perhaps it’s not as radical as the things we talked about when we were young, but in terms of practical effects, it’s probably more rewarding.

a senior Ghanaian employee of an international NGO recounts his experience of working in a particular community: ‘When they do the analysis themselves, they realize what the problems are and start to challenge them.’ As in certain anthropological theories (Barth 1987, Goody 1968), writing is imagined as a ‘Western’ practice that reveals contradictions and inconsistencies sustained within ‘indigenous’ oral cultures. Through identifying ‘problems’ with the indigenous system, development workers seek to highlight how the beliefs and institutions associated with it could be improved.

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In focusing on the respective ‘strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’ of indigenous and Western forms of knowledge, each is imagined as the counterpart to the other: indigenous systems are understood to be ‘local’, ‘specific’ and ‘cultural’, while Western systems are ‘global’, ‘universal’ and ‘rational’. Conceived as self-evidently distinct, each provides a perspective on the other: ‘indigenous knowledge’ reveals the problems of an ‘external’ system that is not adapted to the local context, just as ‘Western systems’ are invoked in pointing to inequities and lack of transparency in so-called indigenous systems. In discussing these issues in terms of ‘symmetry’, workshop participants see a complementary relationship between these ostensibly distinct domains and hence the possibility for ‘combination’ and ‘connection’. By presenting this opposition in terms of ‘benefits’ and ‘problems’, development workers justify their own activities and interventions. For example they assert that ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘indigenous organizations’ could be more effective if there was more ‘accountability’. These assertions are used to support interventions to document ‘indigenous knowledge’ systems and educate traditional authorities and villagers. International development organizations legitimize their own activities in terms of an ability to ‘build the capacity’ of Ghanaian NGOs, bringing them the kinds of expertise needed to hold the government to account. By the same token, NGOs call for Western governance structures to be ‘Africanized’, so that ‘African culture’ is placed at the centre of development. Where the need for combination and connection is axiomatic, debate focuses on the form this should take and aims to identify the salient ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ characteristics of these apparently discrete epistemological systems.2 In certain moments, however, the distinctiveness of ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ knowledge forms is presented in terms of disconnection and incommensurability. In doing so, detractors question the notion that these different kinds of knowledge can simply be assimilated. For example, during one of the IKDC-organized workshops, participants are asked to come up with recommendations to improve the accountability of the institution of chieftaincy. Earlier it has been suggested that chiefs should be better educated in order to enable them to account to their communities. Contesting this approach, one of the participants, a civil servant, bluntly highlights the incommensurability as he sees it: ‘People are still doing human sacrifice! That is the reality. So how are you going to get receipts for that?’ His intervention challenges the apparent consensus that traditional authorities can be simply incorporated into the

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programmes of development organizations. His inference is that the beliefs, knowledge and practices of chiefs do not conform to the view of ‘indigenous knowledge’ espoused in international development discourse. Although a distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ is at times used to support particular kinds of development intervention, the same opposition is therefore also employed in contesting these interventions. In other words, epistemological difference can be alternatively rendered in terms of combination and connection or dissonance and incommensurability.

Double consciousness The ‘dual identity’ at times asserted by Ghanaian elites also entails an explicit distinction between an ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’ view and a ‘Western’ or ‘modern’ view. At different times this dualistic identity is variously construed as a problem and as a resource. University-educated Ghanaians often locate the country’s economic and political problems in a dissonance between ‘European’ and ‘African’ values. Western education is sometimes said to be ‘confusing’, taking people away from a more ‘authentic’ set of beliefs, practices and relationships. In doing so, it is also seen to create personal dissonance. The corresponding sense of ‘confusion’ is sometimes seen to account for an inability to solve the development problems currently facing the country.3 NGO workers echo this wider sense of dissonance, in describing their own relationships to the villages in which they work. As part of a ‘Western’ system of development and having a ‘Western’ education, they talk of a problematic ‘gap’ and of systems in collision. Jacob (Box 5.2) directs the IKDC and relates the problems of mainstream development in precisely this disconnection. We go [to the village] with our Western concepts of development. And we think if the community is to develop then it must go a certain way – I mean it must have cars, clothes ... When you go, especially as a development worker, with a lot of power and money and things like that, you know, you see the kind of influence you can have. Because, first, you don’t understand the system, you are not part of it. But you are trying to change it. But you change it according to the way that you perceive; it’s not the same as the way the people perceive, you know, which I think has a lot of negative effects.

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Box 5.2 Jacob My interest in development started very young. When I was a student, myself and a few of the educated people thought that, well, we should do something to help. So we tried to form what we called a Youth Development Organization. The idea was to get all the able adults in the village to gather to identify what the problems were. We didn’t have a school, so we just mobilized labour and used our own labour and we actually constructed a school – by ourselves, we didn’t get any support from anywhere. And we did that because we were trying to get the children to go to school. You know, we thought that it was very important for the development of the village. After school I went to Cape Coast to read agriculture, which I chose because I felt it was related to life in my village. In the third year, I went to teach in a secondary school, and formed an agriculture club. Through that I was lucky to meet a development worker, working for the Catholic Church. Anytime he was going out to the field, he invited me, which I did voluntarily. For me it was an interesting job because development was something that I like to do. I graduated in 1982 and after that this development officer contacted me to offer me a job working with the Catholic Church, as the national coordinator for their agricultural programmes. Then in 1991, there was a very interesting coincidence. A German researcher came to do some work and I went out with him to the field – you know, as a kind of local partner in the work. And we worked quite well: we liked each other and we liked what we were doing together. So this gentleman finished his work and went back and got a job with a German NGO, as a resident representative for the West African sub-region. When he came, he had to get some staff, so immediately he thought that I was the right guy to work with him. The programme was mostly in Ghana doing political education. We brought people from other countries where political decentralization was going on and shared the experiences from these. Of course, we had to be very careful how we did it – not to make it look like it had a political face. If it looked like it had a political face then it would seem like a subversive issue – so then that was a problem. Through this work I became interested in the idea of ‘indigenous knowledge’. I saw the role that chiefs could play in the process, because of the legitimacy that they have in their communities. But I was also disillusioned with the way development has failed to work in Ghana. I saw all the input-based approaches of the early 1980s and these just didn’t work. So I asked myself, what is wrong? That is why I just realized that if you look at the rural communities, with all of our interventions, well, the interventions come and go, but they continue to live their lives, even if they have assistance. So I thought that, well, let’s begin to look again at indigenous systems: how have people used that to organize themselves, to develop themselves? And how can we add to what they are doing? So that is what led me to set up the IKDC and how I came to be doing the job I do today.

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To illustrate the shortcomings of a ‘Western’ perspective and the importance of ‘indigenous knowledge’, he tells me about his own relationship with the village he calls home: When I go back to my village now, I can’t participate in everything there, because I don’t really understand. There are certain things that I won’t understand because I haven’t had a chance to go through it, to learn it. Because, see, there are other education systems: one the formal education which is going through school and learning the Western education; but then there’s the informal education which is learning by doing. You live with your father on the farm or mother, wherever she is, and learn whatever is doing [...]. For example with my own tribe we have this special person, it’s more or less a school where they teach you all the norms, all the survival strategies, how you should be a human being. If you haven’t gone through that, then you are not considered a complete person in the village. There are certain discussions you can’t participate in. I haven’t gone through that. If living ‘between two worlds’ leads to a sense of dissonance that development workers describe as personally disorienting, it also leads to a sense of ‘dual identity’ that is understood in more positive terms. In the idiom of ‘indigenous knowledge’, Ghanaian development workers suggest that knowledge of ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ systems makes it possible to see from ‘both’ perspectives. Having experience of ‘indigenous’ knowledge systems and of a ‘Western’ education, Jacob relates his personal duality to his effectiveness as a development practitioner: Western education, we can’t compromise. We need it, you know, because it’s the outside that brings development. And if you go back there [to the village] then you say, ‘How do we have synergy of the outside and the inside to move forwards?’ Expertise is located in the movement between these epistemological conditions. Ghanaian development workers foreground their ‘cultural’ background and upbringing in ‘the village’ as the basis on which to comment on the ‘Western knowledge’ of the parliamentary system. By the same token they foreground their ‘Western’ education in order to create a critical perspective on indigenous knowledge. European and Ghanaian development workers both recognize the unique role that

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educated Ghanaians play in mediating between these purportedly different systems. Development workers claim ‘indigenous’ identity at different scales, variously on the basis of knowledge of a particular village or community, a national ‘Ghanaian’ culture and even a broader ‘African’ perspective. Chris (Box 5.3) came to Ghana as an exile from Liberia and has since held prominent positions in a range of development organizations. He describes how this gives him a perspective that European development workers lack: I mean I am looking at it with an African eye; with an African cultural background, some of which are similar to here [ ... ] the kind of attachment people have to the land: ‘this is my place – this is where my father was’. They have this emotional attachment to it, something that is universally African. The other [aspect] is the context in which you are doing development. You know, infrastructure is limited, people don’t have decent services. I lived under those circumstances, working in diversity, different ethnic groups, and they themselves live under those circumstances. An ‘African perspective’ is understood as a source of knowledge and experience that European development workers lack. In various contexts, development workers ‘perform’ (Ebron 2002) their dual identities, as do representatives of traditional authorities. During an opening speech at a IKDC workshop held in Accra Nana, Nketsia V, Omanhene4 of Essikado traditional area in the Western region and lecturer in History at the University of Cape Coast, introduces himself as ‘a very modern chief’, elucidating his roles as both a member of the ‘traditional authority’ and as a part of the ‘modern education system’. This explicit duality is made apparent in his more general dress and demeanour. Although he wears the ‘traditional’ dress of a Fanti chief – a brightly coloured kente cloth, leather sandals and highly ornamented gold regalia – he also carries a state-of-the-art mobile telephone and speaks with a clipped English accent, the product, he later informs me, of time spent at boarding school and at university in the United Kingdom. This self-consciously ‘dual’ identity has its counterpart in the form of the speech itself, which combines erudite, scholarly language with more colloquial idioms including Ghanaian ‘Ananse’ stories and proverbs.5 As such it bears similarities to the ‘Big English’ described by Hasty (2005). Big English, she suggests, is a densely embellished form of

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Box 5.3 Chris I am motivated purely by my own circumstances. As I speak to you my mother, my brothers, my sisters ... I mean they are all in Liberia. They are all living under the tragedy that we are witnessing. So it’s a reality for me. They are the victims of unfairness in society; they are the victims of injustice to them. So I am very much inspired to do what I am doing because of the reality. And I am also motivated by all the struggles I experienced growing up back home. My mother didn’t want me to go to school; she wanted me to get a trade to bring the money in. Fortunately my grandmother had the foresight to see what an education can do. Still, she didn’t have any money so I had to live away from home and get by in whatever way I could – I did all the bad things apart from killing, just in order to survive. All these things challenged me in lots of ways to want to see how I can make society better. Fortunately I went to high school in Monrovia, where a British family took me in as a house boy. They paid my school fees and then when I finished high school, they paid my fees through university. It was there I got into politics. We were talking about setting up committees in the villages and we were branded as communists. But that inspired us because we were offering alternatives to the system. As a result I was detained for treason. After I was released I went abroad and during that time friends told me the police had raided my house. It was obvious that it would be unsafe to return so I became an exile in Holland. I started attending university but I soon realized I wanted to come back to Africa. I’ve always felt strongly that where I felt comfortable and where I felt I could make an impact and be recognized was in Africa. A chance came up and I was able to work for a Dutch Catholic NGO that was working in Ghana. In 1989, the project finished and I stayed on to help set up one of the first participatory training centres in Ghana. It worked very well, and then, you know, many people got to know about me from then – many donor agencies. So when the contract ended I was asked by the donors to extend it for another few years. But I didn’t want to keep doing that, so I changed jobs and went to work for one of the leading Ghanaian NGOs. I worked there for a few years but realized I wanted to do development in a different way. I’d been doing a lot of evaluation and training and telling NGOs what I think is correct. And then you find that they are not doing it – it’s a waste of your time. You get a lot of money but I thought it was better that I work for myself. That’s why I set up this NGO and I’ve been director of that ever since. It’s not a perfect situation by any means. It’s not an agenda of my own per se. We are working in the NGO business; you look for what is in there that is marketable. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were real alternatives, but now capitalism is the only way. So it’s difficult: how do we question the dominant development paradigm which is driving globalization, the corporate economy, the corporate interest, that is driving globalization? How do we articulate the alternative? We are afraid to call it socialist because we can’t get funding so we call ourselves civil society, you see! That’s the identity crisis of people like myself.

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speech characterized by a mixture of official vocabulary and the use of bureaucratic terms and acronyms. Although this is ostensibly and selfavowedly a very modern kind of language, Hasty notes parallels with Akan courtly language: ‘As the density of linguistic embellishments indicates the material wealth and accumulation of the Asante state, the density of bureaucratic language indicates the intellectual accumulation of foreign-educated African elites and their access to crucial flows of foreign trade and development aid’ (2005: 59–60). The rhetorical force of Big English is derived from the demonstration of mastery over Western knowledge, but it also draws from a more traditional set of linguistic strategies, ‘poaching on the symbolic capital of the colonizer’s language, while simultaneously drawing on African features of authoritative oratory’ (2005: 58). Like other linguistic scholars, Hasty notes the importance of linguistic ability in the construction of status in West Africa (Ebron 2002, Piot 1999, Yankah 1995). While Hasty reports that such linguistic strategies establish the authority of Ghanaian journalists implicitly, Nana Nketsia’s speech explicitly foregrounds the ‘indigenous’ and ‘Ghanaian’ elements of his speech, as distinct from the ‘modern’ and ‘Western’ ones. In making this duality apparent, he establishes his own authority to speak, in the movement between the ‘indigenous’ perspective of chiefs and the ‘Western’ perspective of development. More generally chiefs construct themselves as ‘intermediaries’, capable of translating between the ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’ views of their subjects and the ‘Western’ or ‘modern’ domains of government and the state.

Refusing difference Since the dualism between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ is foundational to the development concept of ‘indigenous knowledge’, ideas, people and activities that elude this oppositional logic are regarded as problematic. An indigenous knowledge approach is central to the Wenchi Natural Resource Management Project’s (WENREMP; see Chapter 4) attempts to eradicate bushfire. By using the ‘indigenous knowledge’ of villagers, project documents outline a strategy for tackling the region’s bushfire problems that is not dependent on ‘external’ ideas alone. The role of the project is not simply to ‘complement’ ‘indigenous knowledge’ with their ‘Western’ knowledge, but also to facilitate exchange between these perspectives. In light of WENREMP’s desire to enhance the autonomy and independence of such communities through an ethic of ‘self-help’,

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the extent to which the relationship engenders complicity and dependency is regarded as a problem. This difficulty is made apparent during a durbar (meeting) held in Agubie, one of the eight villages in which the project was working.6 A couple of months before the event, a Ghanaian consultant academic visited the village to carry out a study of the role of indigenous knowledge in the prevention of bushfire. The durbar is to convey these findings back to the villagers, enabling them to assess whether the consultant’s conclusions are accurate and, if necessary, to contribute further details and amendments. WENREMP staff regard the decision to hold the durbar in Agubie as a measure of the project’s commitment to ‘participatory’ ideals. Through bringing development workers and local dignitaries to a small village of about 500 inhabitants, located an hour away from the district capital, WENREMP staff also regard the event as symbolizing a broader desire to engage with communities ‘on their own terms’. Because the village lacks electricity, a generator and PA system are brought from Wenchi. In the centre of the village brightly coloured awnings are erected, shading white plastic chairs for the villagers and guests. The event gets under way with the introduction of those present: people from the village sit under one canopy; dignitaries and guests sit under another. The seating arrangements spatially concretize the distinction upon which the event is premised, separating ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ perspectives. Among those present are the Presiding Member of the Wenchi district assembly, representatives of local NGOs and the head of the Wenchi fire service. A representative of WENREMP speaks first, explaining that in order to help the community prevent bushfire it is necessary to know about the community’s existing beliefs and practices. This is followed by a summary of the research findings, which were undertaken on behalf of the project by a Ghanaian consultant academic and stress the importance of villagers’ ‘traditional beliefs’ in the prevention of bushfire. Coming from the North of Ghana the consultant does not speak the local language (twi), so his speech is relayed via a lengthy process of translation. A series of taboos are mentioned along with the beliefs that uphold these. It is suggested that these have been vital in the prevention of fire. Yet in recent years, he concludes, such beliefs have been eroded, leading to the problems associated with increasing bushfire incidence. The village’s problems are therefore located in the loss of ‘indigenous knowledge’. Correspondingly the solution is seen to inhere in the recuperation of these perspectives.

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Following the main speeches, villagers are asked to give their views on the report. Feedback is prematurely cut short by one of the village elders, who explains that since the findings are ‘correct’ there is nothing more to add. After a series of attempts by project staff to cajole the villagers into a more ‘engaged’ response, the session is brought to a premature close. Talking to project staff as we drive back to the project offices, they express dissatisfaction. The event was meant to be ‘participatory’ but people did not participate in the way that they hoped. Imagining the event as an opportunity for ‘dialogue’ and ‘discussion’ between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ perspectives, they are chastened by the lack of ‘dialogue’ and ‘exchange’. WENREMP staff highlight the ‘lack of debate’ and the way in which the pronouncements of village elders ‘mimicked’ and ‘pandered’ to officialdom. Stephen (Box 4.2), one of the project officers, points to the villagers’ elaborate votes of thanks and a military style drill performed by the village fire volunteers as evidence of their ‘reification of Western values’. By contrast, the village elders see the event as a success. When I speak to the chairman of the village fire service volunteers, he claims that it is an honour for such a small village to play host to so many important speakers. Another village elder talks of the good work that WENREMP have been doing, and elucidates his hopes that the WENREMP will continue their work in the future. For village elders and dignitaries, the event’s significance partly inheres in its demonstration of their own connectedness, importance and capacity to elicit much-needed development resources. Such connections are imagined to make it possible to obtain various material resources but are also seen as resources in their own right (cf. Benson 2003), conferring status and power. In different ways villagers therefore (deliberately or not) misrecognize their part in the event. For WENREMP staff this is a problem, undermining the very rationale of the project as a form of ‘mediation’ and ‘exchange’ between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ perspectives. Their expertise as ‘mediators’ and ‘facilitators’ is effectively made redundant by villagers’ unwillingness to conform to the oppositional logic foundational to the project.

Chieftaincy and development WENREMP staff understand ‘indigenous knowledge’ as a ‘traditional’ set of views and beliefs emanating from people who live in the communities in which development interventions are undertaken. In other contexts

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the concept of ‘indigenous knowledge’ is conflated with the institution of chieftaincy. This discourse of indigenous knowledge plays into longstanding debates about the role of chieftaincy in Ghana. Chiefs and their advocates draw on these ideas to highlight the potential role of traditional authorities in development initiatives. Others are more ambivalent about the extension of political and economic power that this represents. In a variety of contexts, chiefs employ discourses of indigenous knowledge to assert the need for their own involvement in development. During one of the IKDC indigenous knowledge workshops, a field trip is held to visit Nana Kobina Nketsia V, omanhene of Essikado traditional area in the Western region (introduced above). In his introductory speech he outlines the positive attributes of the institution of chieftaincy, connecting Ghana’s ‘underdevelopment’ to the marginalization of chiefs. The institution of chieftaincy, he notes, has many commendable attributes, such as its democratic nature and its legitimacy in the eyes of the people: ‘The present system of governance in Ghana is an imposition of a Western model on an indigenous governance system. Any development project or political decision taken by government should involve full participation of traditional leaders.’ Thus the idiom of ‘indigenous knowledge’ provides discursive resources that bolster claims for an increasing role in development. Chieftaincy is presented as ‘indigenous’, giving it legitimacy in the eyes of ‘the people’. By contrast, the government is construed as a ‘Western imposition’. Using similar discursive strategies the Asantehene, Otumfour Osei Tutu II has urged chiefs to adopt the role of delivering development and prosperity for their people. As king of the Asante, the largest ethnic group in Ghana, he has actively engaged in the development sector. Aside from launching his own Education Fund he has also gained significant backing from foreign donors, most notably gaining $5 million under the World Bank-funded project entitled ‘Promoting Partnership with Traditional Authorities’ (PPTA). This aims to fund a range of initiatives including the construction of schools and health facilities as well as the installation of boreholes in 40 communities within the Asante region.7 Explicitly conceived by the World Bank in the idiom of indigenous knowledge, the project is described in World Bank reports as ‘an innovative pilot project to explore the possibilities of working more closely with indigenous organizations’ (World Bank 2003). The work undertaken through the scheme is not itself remarkable, consisting of a package of standard development interventions including the development of educational and healthcare facilities. However, World Bank documents emphasize the ‘innovative’ nature of the programme. Project

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literature stresses the novel way in which traditional authorities oversee these activities, highlighting both the reduction of ‘bureaucracy’ and the sense of ‘ownership’ that accompanies this move. The Asantehene’s own public rhetoric broadly echoes that of the World Bank, suggesting that effective development results from the combination of two self-evidently distinct systems. In a speech made in a keynote address to the African Development Forum he states that: I would like to draw attention to the phenomena of dualism in Africa and the role chiefs play in eliminating or attenuating it. Almost every African state has two worlds: one world is largely urban where modernization is evident in terms of the constitution, modern Western-oriented laws, a developed physical infrastructure, existence of health and other social facilities [...]. The other world which is predominantly in rural areas is populated by the majority of the citizenry, is hardly touched by the sophisticated constitutional and legal structures [...]. The people in this world have a largely traditional view and look to chiefs for development. (Otumfour Osei Tutu II 2004) In this view, the role of chiefs is somewhat ambiguous: although they operate principally in the domain of ‘tradition,’ they are imagined as representatives of this within the ‘modern’ sphere of governance. Thus, in the words of the Asantehene, they ‘mediate’ between the two and ‘help bridge the gap’. At times this image of chieftaincy is contested, as when NGO workers criticize the Asantehene’s PPTA initiative as ‘political’. Even among Ghanaian NGO workers who profess support for the greater involvement of chiefs, reservations are often voiced regarding the project’s ‘lack of transparency’, and the existence of a potentially corrupting ‘friendship’ between the Asantehene and President Kufour.8 Such sentiments have also been articulated more widely including in a number of critical newspaper articles and in an open letter to the World Bank president that appears in an online discussion group: My community was one of those [in the project] but I am yet to see a single development. Mr Wolfowitz, I have reason to believe that money has been squandered [...]. You may be wondering why I am not sending this letter to the president [of Ghana]. The reason is simple. Any government led investigation will simply be a whitewash because the president is a subject of the Asantehene. (Poku 2005)

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In claiming that the president is a ‘subject’ of the Asantehene, the letter thus alludes to an apparent inversion in which the formal power of the democratically elected president is subordinated to the chief of the Asante. While such criticisms specifically seek to question the role of the Asantehene, similar criticisms are also made of the institution of chieftaincy more generally. A newspaper report in the state-owned Daily Chronicle argues that by contrast to the past when chieftaincy was a ‘solemn and divine institution’, in more recent years it has been ‘corrupted’ by colonialism: ‘Through this indirect rule system [the British] made the chiefs do [its] dirty work for [them] ... The turning point of our chieftaincy politics from the old divine order to the modern dirty order was here.’9 Rathbone (2000) notes that since Independence, chiefs in Ghana have been largely marginal, because they are dependent on an oftenhostile state for resources (see also Boafo 1987, Ninsin 1998). In this context, development organizations have recently created new financial and discursive opportunities. As one Asante chief remarks to me during an indigenous knowledge workshop in Wenchi, ‘the government won’t give us any money unless it’s election time, but we can get resources from the World Bank’. More generally chiefs bolster their position, both individually and institutionally, through the international resources they are able to garner through ‘indigenous knowledge’ projects, and through the legitimizing discourses that accompany these. Guyer has noted that chiefs in Nigeria use the ‘cultural geographies of Pan-Africanism’ (1994: 220) to consolidate their power and influence as a component of civil society. In Ghana a similar process seems to be taking place through the idiom of ‘indigenous knowledge’. Many development workers see this as a positive move, seeing chiefs as more in touch with ‘the people’, less ‘bureaucratic’ and more ‘locally sensitive’. However, fears have been raised, in the national media and by various NGO representatives, that institutions such as the chieftaincy are less accountable (and hence more easily ‘corrupted’) than formally governed private and state organizations. More particularly, criticism of the PPTA initiative has focused on the extent to which the domain of chieftaincy is ‘politicized’. Much of this debate is premised upon a distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ forms. In such discourses, argument centres on the extent to which chieftaincy is indeed ‘indigenous.’ Discourses of indigenous knowledge originating in, but by no means confined to, development organizations provide new discursive

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contexts within which these debates take place – contexts that include the national media, the Internet and indigenous knowledge conferences. In doing so, they draw from and re-inscribe a variety of related existing oppositions including those between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, ‘native’ and ‘European’. As I have already suggested, these are used by a variety of actors to perform identities and to make claims in a shifting and highly contextual manner. It is worth noting, as a number of NGO representatives have done, that such discourses tend to favour the centralized, formalized and hierarchical chieftaincies characteristic among the Akan of Southern Ghana, over the more acephalous systems that predominate in the North (Lentz and Nugent 2000). Although the contemporary search for ‘indigenous’ systems purports to come from a ‘participatory’ and ‘democratizing’ impulse, in many ways it therefore parallels the search for indigenous institutions to support the colonial system of indirect rule.

Conflicting domains As well as framing debates about the nature of chieftaincy, an indigenous/Western opposition is also used to describe differences – and even conflicts – between the ways in which chiefs and development workers communicate. Here the distinction is not so much a matter of epistemology as of identity. During the IKDC workshops on indigenous knowledge, chiefs are frequently in attendance, taking part in the various discussions and debates. While the chiefs invited to such events are often relatively well educated, their participation is sometimes seen to complicate proceedings. Both European and Ghanaian development workers express concerns that chiefs communicate in a different ‘less direct’ ways and that at times this leads to misunderstandings. During a WENREMP-sponsored workshop attended by chiefs in the areas surrounding Wenchi and Techiman, one of the conveners describes to me the different modes of communication employed by chiefs and development workers respectively, suggesting that the facilitator of the event is particularly skilled at mediating between the two. Development workers, she suggests, all communicate in ‘Accra talk’:10 everything they say is direct, explicit and confrontational. By contrast, she explains, chiefs communicate ‘indirectly’, using proverbs and diplomatic language to conceal conflict. Yankah (1995) describes how the pronouncements of chiefs are publicly rendered by the Okyeame (linguist), who embellishes speech with proverbs that display his own

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linguistic skill, while rendering chiefly pronouncements as polysemic. The NGO worker suggests that the facilitator has similar skills and abilities in rendering pronouncements and ideas ‘indirectly’. In such development workshops, however, the process of translation is imagined to work both ways: if the ‘Accra talk’ of NGO workers has to be rendered in the ‘indirect talk’ of chiefs, then chiefs’ pronouncements also have to be translated into the ‘direct’ language of NGO workers. Chiefs also recognize the need to behave differently in these situations. Arriving at an indigenous knowledge workshop in Techiman, I am surprised to see one of the Wenchi sub-chiefs wearing grey flannels and a smart white shirt. His clothes contrast markedly with the attire of the other chiefs who all wear ‘traditional’ cloths and sandals. I ask him about his choice of clothing: ‘This is a clerical event, so I wanted to be smart and free,’ he explains. McCaskie (1995) notes how public performances of stately wealth reproduce the power of Asante chiefs. In the array of kente cloth, gold regalia and other chiefly accoutrements, these performances come to symbolize the wealth and accumulation of the Asante state as a whole. At this event, as in ‘indigenous knowledge’ events more generally, those chiefs who choose to wear cloths, sandals and regalia come as the embodiment of the institutions they represent, and demonstrate their power and wealth as such. By contrast those who come in ‘Western’ dress acknowledge the ‘freedom’ and ‘openness’ that comes through detachment from this. Despite the efforts of some chiefs to obviate their position of power and authority, Ghanaian NGO workers regard their presence as an inhibition to the kind of ‘free’ and ‘open’ debate they hope for. ‘In Ghana people have respect for chiefs,’ one NGO worker explains, ‘so if they say something, then nobody wants to contradict them.’ Yet the workshops and conferences in which chiefs participate are generally regarded as governed by a ‘Western’ set of values, dictating that ‘everybody is equal’ such that opinion can be expressed ‘freely’ and ‘openly’. This leads to a sense of discomfort on the part of some Ghanaian development workers. During the Techiman workshop, Stephen (Box 4.2) explains to me his moral and personal anxiety at having to tell one of the local chiefs that since they had not been invited to the event, they would not be able to participate: ‘This person is a chief, somebody I respect more even than my own father, so I feel ashamed that we have to send him away.’ He explains that, as somebody born in a neighbouring village, he owes respect to the chief. His authority as a development worker therefore comes into conflict with affiliations based on kinship and birth.

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Although discourses of ‘indigenous knowledge’ are at times strategically drawn upon, it is necessary to recognize that the meanings of such discourses are not reducible to their political or strategic function. At moments such as these, they are also used to express acutely felt personal tensions and anxieties.

Recursivity Anthropological critiques of development, as Lewis and Mosse (2006) note, have frequently been premised on a distinction between ‘Western’ development knowledge and the ‘indigenous knowledge’ held by particular ‘local’ communities. In this vein, Hobart (1993b) is critical of development, suggesting that its ‘specialist’ and universal forms of knowledge dismiss the insights and perspectives of ‘local peoples’’ indigenous knowledge. Sillitoe’s (1998) more applied approach shares an assumption that such knowledge forms are distinct, but sees in these – as many development workers do themselves – a complementary relationship that allows for connection and combination. Thus he proposes that ‘a central problem with incorporating indigenous knowledge into development projects is the bridging of the gap between our scientifically founded technology and their local awareness and practices’ (1998: 230). A number of recent anthropological critiques have taken a more deconstructive approach, suggesting that this opposition is unhelpful. These critiques make evident the problems of assuming such oppositions as an analytic starting point, arguing that this leads to the reduction of social and cultural diversity to a binary logic (e.g. Crewe and Harrison 1998). Although this point is well taken, the analytic dismissal of an indigenous/Western contrast has often led to the outright dismissal of the practices and discourses that accompany the indigenous knowledge approach. By contrast, this chapter reveals how these understandings and practices are drawn into forms of relationship, identity and knowledge that cannot be understood in terms of the oppositional logic that the approach overtly engenders. Although a variety of ‘indigenous knowledge’ discourses assert this opposition in absolute terms, there is nothing absolute about the way in which it is used and encountered as an issue of social life. ‘Indigenous knowledge’ discourses are used by a variety of actors, including European and Ghanaian development workers, chiefs, the media and the communities in which development interventions occur in ways that confuse any straightforward separation between

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an ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ perspective. Discourses of ‘indigenous knowledge’ are inherently neither ‘indigenous’ nor ‘Western’: they constitute a set of internationally legible terms through which various development actors make a variety of contextual distinctions between their respective forms of knowledge and identity. The distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ can thus be described in terms of a recursive logic. Although ‘indigenous knowledge’ discourses presuppose a relatively absolute sociological and/or epistemological distinction, in practice the indigenous/Western contrast is used to draw highly fluid boundaries, according to context. Through these contextual positionings, development elites and chiefs in different ways exploit the financial and discursive resources that have accompanied the indigenous knowledge approach. Both seek to pursue personal and political projects, in attempting to re-describe a complex reality in these terms. Such discourses might in this sense be regarded as instances of the kind of ‘extroversion’ that Bayart (1993) takes to characterize the operation of post-colonial elites in Africa. Both chiefs and elites use education and positions of privilege in order to capture an external set of resources. This idea certainly has some descriptive purchase. However, I hope this chapter makes evident that appreciation of the political and instrumental uses of the ‘indigenous knowledge’ should not lead us to overlook the subtle forms of repositioning and re-imagining that these terms provoke.

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6 Policy and Practice

If development has been widely imagined as a hegemonic form of Western power, then policy has been seen as the central form through which this operates. Policymakers and development bureaucrats present policy as a neutral and objective process of arriving at solutions. These claims have come under increasing scrutiny from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. As part of wider ‘post-development’ critiques, policy has been revealed as a legitimizing discourse (e.g. Apthorpe 1997, Escobar 1990, Shore and Wright 1997). Rather than illuminate the social realities they describe, policymakers have been criticized for fabricating representations of reality that re-inscribe unequal political relations and justify their own capacity to intervene. As a critique of some of the practices that come together under the name of policy, these deconstructive approaches contribute an important insight: as a discursive practice, policy conceals important aspects of the social and political relations through which it is produced. Yet this deconstructive critique runs into a number of problems that recent work has helped to highlight. Perhaps most significantly, in treating policy as a coherent set of processes and practices, critics have over-stated the power that policy holds. In this regard, scholars have tended to take policymakers’ own proclamations too literally, seeing coherence as an underlying, intrinsic property of policy, rather than an outcome of diverse and scattered practices. Extending this insight, the chapter explores some of the contexts in which ideas of policy are enacted (Mol 2002, Mosse 2005a). Rather than adjudicate policy ‘representations’ with respect to ‘reality’, I seek to understand the spaces that policy practices produce and the relationships they lead to. This entails understanding the opposition between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’, not as an analytic 146

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frame but as an artefact of the practices of particular development actors.

Creating coherence Over the past two decades bilateral and multilateral donors have increasingly emphasized ‘good governance’ as the means to various forms of social and economic development and as a developmental end in its own right. This has resulted in the proliferation of projects aiming to improve the ‘responsiveness’ and ‘accountability’ of a variety of public organizations. The first sections of this chapter focus on one of these, the Forest Governance Project (FGP). Based in the headquarters of the Forestry Commission in Ghana’s capital Accra, and administered by a firm of private consultants, the project aims to bring about ‘organizational development’. As one of the ex-patriot project staff elucidates during a presentation to Forestry Commission district managers, this entails ‘moving from a culture based on who you know, on patronage and on networking, to one based on rule-based mechanisms’. In this respect, FGP staff imagine themselves ‘enabling’ a process that Forestry Commission employees bring about of their own accord. Resonating with globally recognizable discourses of ‘good governance’, the project could be understood as an instance of the globalization of this wider neo-liberal logic. Anders (2005) argues along these lines in relation to Malawi, suggesting that an emphasis on ‘ownership’ conceals the mundane processes through which Bretton Woods institutions and Western governments control and discipline Third World countries. In a Foucauldian analysis, he emphases the role of apparently objective policy discourses in legitimating the extension of Western governmentality. ‘Good governance’ becomes the assumed norm against which local practices are pathologized as conforming to the illegitimate workings of ‘patrimonial’ relations. In certain respects this perspective highlights a dynamic that FGP staff themselves recognize. As a project their role turns on the paradoxical position of bringing about change that cannot primarily be recognized as deriving from their own actions. To be ‘successful’ the project depends on being able to present its activities as simultaneously independent from the donor funding it and upholding its policies. This in turn depends on being able to present the activities of various ‘beneficiaries’ (Forestry Commission staff, NGOs and community-based organizations (CBOs)) as conforming to, yet independent of project activities. At both levels, the language of ‘participation’ entails

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concealed dependency: apparently independent organizations are forced to make themselves available to others in forms of discourse not straightforward of their own making. Yet to suggest that this entails a process of neo-liberal globalization overstates the extent to which the resulting practices and relationships do indeed conform to an overarching principle. At different levels, the ability to elicit funds depends on a capacity to tie specific practices into bigger policy narratives. This should not be confused for the determination of practice by policy. Various actors’ attempts to make their activities appear as part of a wider ‘global’ logic, depend on their own engagement in practices and relationships that exceed (if not entirely elude) this logic. FGP employees themselves recognize the extent to which effective enactment of donor policy entails resorting to relational forms directly at a tangent to the objectives of the project. Changing the ‘policy context’ is said to necessitate the use of ‘corridor politics’ and ‘local mechanisms’ to influence key government officials. In other words, formal agreements are enabled by formally invisible personal relationships (see Chapter 3). To this end, attention is directed to ‘making the right contacts’. Similarly, eliciting the backing of ‘civil society’ is understood to require using ‘local’ strategies. Here, again, ‘personal contacts’ are cultivated for strategic purposes. Other ‘local mechanisms’, such as the payment of per diem payments at workshops, are also acknowledged to be important in elicitation of support by CBOs and NGOs, who at times have little interest in the formal objectives of the project. To the extent that FGP appears to further the aims of globally current development discourses, this coherence is therefore after the fact (Mosse 2005b) of disparate and otherwise unrelated practices. In other words ‘global policy’ is an effect of practices and relationships that cannot be subsumed within an encompassing ‘global’ logic.

Engaging through detachment A key aspect of FGP’s activities is the provision of ‘policy support’. As a project summary outlines, this entails providing the Forestry Commission with a ‘consistent and coherent top-down mandate for change’. While the project is not intended to produce direct intervention, it is intended to facilitate actors’ own interventions on themselves through providing the policy rationale for change. Underpinning a variety of project activities are a set of beliefs about the role of project staff as creators and enactors of ‘policy’.

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Academic critics of policy have frequently highlighted how policy simplifications conceal or misrepresent the true nature of the realities they seek to change. While such critiques may be based on sound academic principles, critiques of the content of particular policies tend to overlook the forms through which they operate (Lea 2002, Riles 2001). Rather than point to overlooked complexities, I therefore wish to highlight the distinctive epistemological commitments that these entail. Staring out through the reflective glass of the FGP project headquarters, beyond the air-conditioning units to the yard outside, the project leader remarks to me: ‘this is not reality’. In making this startling claim, he foregrounds his own ‘detachment’ from the specific workings of the project. This detachment is less explicitly concretized in the office architecture in quite a literal sense. While he sits in a large airconditioned room, other members of the project are located elsewhere in the building. His conceptual position of detachment and ‘oversight’ (Latour 1999) is literally marked by the occupation of a room that is separate from, and higher than, those occupied by other project staff. Material and architectural distinctions also mark the FGP project as a whole from the Forestry Commission – the ‘field’ in which it hopes to bring about change. Accessed via a different entrance, its distinctiveness from the rest of the organization was conspicuously apparent from the smart sign that hangs over the door, and the newly renovated office interior with lavish hardwood panelling. According to the project director, the virtues of such detachment partly lie in their facilitation of ‘strategic thinking’. Chatting over lunch one day he explains to me the difficulties of his job: ‘My role is to manage everything, from the whole system to individual cognition’. This is only possible by reducing the complexity of the ‘system’, he manages. ‘I run a forestry project but I don’t think I’ve seen a tree the whole of the time I’ve been in Ghana’. According to Tobias, complexity is synonymous with ‘reality’. Effective policy implementation only becomes possible by occupying a space outside this. As a former student of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, he explains his role in terms of systems theory, suggesting that the project takes place within a complex ‘environment’ that has to be simplified in order to be understood (Luhmann 1982). In order to enact good policy he does not require complete knowledge of that ‘environment’ (which in his view is neither be possible nor desirable); he only needs to know enough about that system to make possible the prioritization of project activities. In the context of scientific practice, Latour (1999) outlines the concept of ‘oversight’, a term that simultaneously encapsulates the idea of

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looking from above and ignoring what is being looked at. In gaining a broader view, there is always a corresponding loss of detail. In a parallel move, the FGP project manager’s discussion of his own role resonates with broader understandings of policy. In enacting policy, the loss of certain kinds of detail (aspects of ‘reality’) are required in order to bring a ‘bigger picture’ into view. Paradoxically ignorance of ‘reality’ becomes a claim to knowledge of a different, ‘higher’ order. Less knowledge is in certain respects more. Policy is also understood to be opposed to ‘reality’ in another sense. Where ‘reality’ is equated with fixity, policy is equated with fluidity. If ‘reality’ stands for how things are, policy stands for how they could be. Thus an anonymously authored project report produced for the project funders, suggests that Eshu Elegbara, a West African trickster figure, be considered as patron saint and role model for the project.1 Though partly playful the report makes explicit the project’s role as an agent of change. Eshu Elegbara, the report suggests, ‘is the owner of all roads, stands behind all doors and [...] knows where to find everything in the world’. As a trickster: Eshu embodies the sophisticated metaphysics of West Africa, a metaphysics of change and communication, of the copulation of being and the world, of the complex power of the crossroads [...]. He gives ideas and information – not the whole story, but just enough to make the story happen [...] moving along the seam of different worldviews, he confuses communication, reveals the ambiguity of knowledge and plays with perspectives. So Eshu is a master of change, of crossed purposes, of crossed speech. Eshu brings new ideas, calling attention to the arbitrariness of norms and conventions and, in doing so, providing alternate angles to view the larger process. Eshu Elegbara’s capacity to bring about change inheres in his ability to transcend the conventions, norms and fixity that are associated with ‘reality’. The report concludes that he is an ideal role model, because he teaches that change occurs in the ability to imagine how things could be. Such descriptions of knowledge are not neutral. In claiming to exist outside ‘reality’, FGP staff erase the specificity of the practices through which their own understandings are produced. In doing so they lay claim to a universality of vision that others lack. It is partly in that vision that the conviction and hence power of policy inheres (Apthorpe 1997, Shore and Wright 1997). Removal of policymakers from the space

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in which things happen creates detachment. The physical and social distance that comes with this is not tantamount to absence but rather to greater control (Munro 1999). Policy pronouncements come to seem objective precisely because they are removed from the day-to-day activities of the people and organizations they relate to.

Policy in action While acknowledging the inextricable connection of policy knowledge and power, it is not my intention simply to critique these epistemic forms. Academic critiques have tended to render policy representational in order to submit it to textual critique (Green forthcoming). In other words, policies have been abstracted from the practices and relations that support them. In doing so, these critiques tend to overlook the distinct, epistemological commitments that underpin policy and academia respectively. These differences became apparent in my dealings with FGP staff, who highlight the importance of simplification against an academic tendency to ‘over-complicate’. A discussion with the FGP director illuminates these ideas. Commenting on an anthropological article on forest loss in West Africa, he argues that the piece is ‘pointless’ since its only real conclusion – the only real conclusion of any research – is that ‘more research is needed’. His criticism is not that the article lacks knowledge. Rather, he makes the claim that it contains too much. Later he elaborates these ideas in an email that outlines his wider criticism of academic research: The worst thing that can happen to an individual is to know too much and, thus, fall beyond knowledge into the ditch of frigidity. Proliferating this information which is larger than the needs and capacities of any individual, is far from providing us with any vital insights but only demonstrates the importance of research. In order to bring about change, he suggests, the task is not to add to the accumulation of knowledge but to subtract from it. The aim in writing policy, he concludes, is to achieve ‘the symbolic mastery of absence’. For FGP employees simplification is not tantamount to an absence of complexity. Rather it is an active achievement and an epistemological aim. A good policy should have a ‘point’; it should focus activities on specific strategic possibilities. ‘Reality’ has to be stripped down and pared back – rendered in terms of ‘gaps’ that project activities can ‘fill’

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(Apthorpe 1997). The sense that the project leader talks of ‘absence’ as something to be ‘symbolically mastered’. ‘Absence’ is not tantamount to a deficiency or lack but an achievement, whose identification is tied to specific strategic possibilities. It is in this sense that ‘knowledge’ is understood as opposed to strategic effect. In this way, ‘problems’ are identified and tied to ‘solutions’. FGP project documents render ‘reality’ in terms amenable to its own intervention. The existence of ‘patrimonial relations’ is connected to a corresponding absence of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’. Tying their rationale into wider discourses of ‘good governance’, project staff produce documents that outline the ‘way forward’: the Forestry Commission should move away from a culture of ‘patronage’ to one based on ‘formal checks and balances’; this in turn requires ‘strengthening civil society’ as a means to hold the organization to account. Project staff sometimes refer to academic accounts in drafting documents. In doing so, they draw these into their own epistemic forms. Knowledge ‘for itself’ is regarded as ‘pointless’ (Green forthcoming). The efficacy of a text is located in its capacity to frame and elicit ‘action’ rather than in its accuracy or truth (Yarrow 2004). Indeed, issues of ‘truth’ are considered largely beside the point. FGP employees make this explicit in the oft-cited remark that ‘this is not the academic world of right and wrong’. Knowledge is valued only for its capacity to define and support project goals (Green forthcoming); it is viewed as a means to an end, not an end in itself. This instrumental orientation towards knowledge is made apparent during a conversation between one of the project employees and an NGO representative. The FGP employee has become concerned about rumours: he has heard that the government minister has granted concessions to mine on forestry reserves and has called a friend who works for a leading environmental advocacy NGO. The two discuss tactics, agreeing it will be prudent to put a document together. Seeing this text as a means to the ends of the prevention of the bill, both agree a strategy: while the document needs to demonstrate the financial and environmental costs of granting confessions, it is more important for this to be convincing than accurate. ‘It needs to be something that will stop it’, the FGP employee explains, ‘but it needs to be done quickly. This is not academia – if your numbers are wrong, nobody will shoot you’. By explicit contrast to academia, the document is not intended to convey truth, but to elicit response. It needs to be convincing, even at the expense of factual correctness (and even while written in a neutral and objective genre).

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Recognizing reality FGP project employees construct ‘policy’ in opposition to ‘reality’, and recognize the importance of their own detachment from this. Nonetheless detachment is not regarded as tantamount to disconnection. Rather it is indicative of a certain kind of relationship. As such project employees assert the importance of ‘staying in touch’ with reality. On one occasion the project director elucidates these ideas with respect to the different approaches of various donor organizations: ‘At [some], they are all bureaucrats and civil servants, whereas at [others] you have arrogant professionals.’ This caricature is playful and provocative but hints at what he takes to be a wider truth. People at the UN, he suggests, ‘know a lot more about development, but they live in a bureaucratic bubble. They come and go without leaving any footprints in the sand of Ghanaian reality.’ He turns to me and smiles before joking: ‘We are quite far from reality here, but at least I sit by the window!’ Implicitly, this joke makes apparent the wider project philosophy. While ‘detachment’ is required in order to see the ‘bigger picture’, an ability to bring about change also depends on the capacity to ‘connect’. Project staff draw a contrast between the project’s own activities and other donor-funded projects: they highlight their ‘connections’ to ‘Ghanaian reality’ in terms of their ability to engage ‘local mechanisms’ and point to the inclusion of Ghanaian employees in the project; and they highlight the significance of engagement through employees and consultants with good connections ‘on the ground’. As such they contrast their approach with a wider tendency for donor organizations to get drawn into a self-serving detachment that precludes the possibility of ‘real change’. Against the ideal of detached engagement, FGP project staff also identify shortcomings in their own approach. Project failures are identified in terms of disconnections between project goals and ‘reality’. In this sense, ‘reality’ functions as a rhetorical foil, highlighting how actual events depart from strategic objectives. As an inside out version of project activities, ‘reality’ is used to hold those activities up to critical scrutiny. Although such pronouncements often appear critical or subversive, they ultimately act to uphold the interventionist logic at the heart of the project (Lea 2002). While highlighting the limitations of specific interventions, the need to intervene remains unquestioned. Indeed it is precisely in the face of recognized problems that the need to intervene is most acutely felt.

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If ‘reality’ in this sense serves to make apparent the limitations of project activities, ‘reality’ is also invoked by other actors in voicing external criticisms of the project. During an FGP funded workshop to build the capacity of NGOs, a talk is given by a representative of the ministry for forestry and mining. The talk outlines the National Biodiversity Strategy for Ghana. On the face of things it is an uncontroversial talk, summarizing the ministry’s policy, and its basis in international convention. This ‘policy background’, the facilitator has earlier advised, will be useful for those NGOs present. He suggests that working at the community level the problem many NGOs face is that they are divorced from the wider issues in which their interventions take place. The idea of the workshop is to ‘reduce the distance between policy and practice’. Although ostensibly uncontroversial, the speech meets with a hostile response from a number of the workshop delegates. During the questions that follow, participants highlight the ‘gap’ between the ‘rhetoric’ of the talk and the ‘realities’ of the situation ‘on the ground’; between the ‘policy’ that has been elucidated and the ‘practice’ of their own organizations. A particularly trenchant critique comes from the chief of a community in which illegal logging is prevalent. He highlights the disjunction between the discourse employed by the representative from the ministry, and the problems he sees in his own community: We are talking about NEPAD,2 but I am looking at how a scientific word like biodiversity is going to be explained to my mother; how are we really going to get these issues down to the ground? A lot of money is being sunk into these projects, and we don’t need to be going to conferences in [the University of Ghana] Legon or Accra when nothing is happening. So the question I am asking is, what measures are being put in place to ensure that the projects reach the grass roots? FGP equates ‘detachment’ with vision and far-sightedness. By contrast NGO and community representatives highlight how their detachment leads them to ignore important aspects of the ‘reality’ in which the project seeks to intervene. Here policy detachment is rendered as ignorance and a lack of engagement.

Questioning policy through practice Scholarly critiques of policy have often proceeded from the basis of ‘practice’ (e.g. Escobar 2000, Hobart 1993b). Through focusing on the practices through which policy proceeds, critical accounts have highlighted the

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contingent and situated nature of the policy process. Such critiques have been important in focusing attention on aspects of the policy process that get concealed in policy texts and self-representations. However the adoption of ‘practice’ as an analytic concept has tended to preclude ethnographic consideration of the way in which ‘practice’ becomes an ethnographically meaningful term. This section considers how ideas of ‘practice’ are used to contest various policy claims. It does so in the context of an ethnographic vignette drawn from the final meeting of the Participatory Development Network (PADNET) inauguration (see Chapter 4). In July 2003, members of PADNET meet with various representatives of donors, government and civil society in the La Palm hotel, Accra. It is a breakfast meeting, and a chance, I am told by a member of the executive committee, to relay some of their ideas and findings to key development stakeholders. Unlike the other events, which are self-avowedly ‘inclusive’ and ‘participatory’, the meeting is attended by invitation only. Fifteen people are present, including the country directors of a number of bilateral and multilateral donors, and representatives from a range of international NGOs. The room is heavily air-conditioned with lavish marble floors. As delegates arrive they sit themselves around a large table in the centre of the room, where a choice of continental or English breakfast is served. One of the executive committee members remarks that the venue ‘doesn’t really send the right message’, explaining her embarrassment that a meeting about the need to include poor people in decision-making is taking place in Ghana’s premier hotel. But she is a pragmatist, she explains, and realizes that this is what donors and policymakers expect. ‘Policy’ is in this sense a matter of geographical location and architectural setting. Following personal introductions, James (Box 6.1), the PADNET representative, introduces the network, and the aim of the meeting, explaining that while network members see a lot of positive things emerging from recent donor policies, there are a number of anxieties and concerns. In particular he highlights a ‘gap’ between the ‘policies’ that stress greater participation and the ‘practice’.3 He notes that much of the recent donor policy stresses ‘partnership’ but that ‘in practice this does not always equate to equality’: There is a danger that communities feel that other people from outside dominate the partnership – that they set the time frames, the methodologies and so on. These can get so complex – even for practitioners – that it totally dismisses the way in which poor people perceive reality.

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Box 6.1 James I was born in 1958, in Koforidua. My father was the regional commissioner of the Eastern region, so we were living in a residence a few miles out of town – a huge compound. When I was nine, I took the common entrance exam and my father decided I should go to Achimota – the best in the country at the time. At school I took life very easy. I was only interested in passing my exams by the barest minimum. When it got to A levels, we were filling in our forms, I just asked somebody, and I’m being very honest with this, we were given the forms in the morning and we had to know what we wanted to do. But I hadn’t given it much thought. So I remember asking my friend, you know, where is the money, which course is good to do? And he said architecture. I went to university in 1976. I was never really interested in architecture; I was never really interested in designing buildings. I was only really interested in making a good income with minimum effort. Right at the end of the course, Rawlings came back into power and the students were required to go back into the bush and help shift cocoa that wasn’t being moved to the port and help get these onto trucks and so forth. It was supposed to be voluntary and, you know, some of us didn’t find our way into it. We managed to dodge it. So when we had finished we didn’t have anybody else around and the school felt so, so empty. It was like a huge vacuum and, like, what do I do with my life? And a friend of mine, a classmate was going to a prayer meeting that evening and he invited me. So for want of anything better to do I just joined him and we went. And basically my life got transformed that night. You know, I used to be a person who was very lazy, who was very selfish, who was only interested in making money, but that night, you know, I had an experience and basically I gave my life to Jesus Christ. It changed my whole thinking, my whole perception of myself, my whole interest in life. From that moment on my whole agenda changed. I wasn’t anymore going to look for an office where I could build fashionable offices and make the most money but I had to find something to do with myself. So I got employed in a job which was basically about building research. I did that for two years as a part of National Service and afterwards I found a job at university in the department of housing and planning research. I wanted to apply my knowledge of architecture to helping the poor in whatever way I could. That was the best thing I could find at the time so I went into that. The job was to develop cheap building materials but after a while I found that really for poor people, the really poor people, what they needed were more things to do with advocacy, more things to do with arguing the case for them, you know, they were being evicted, nothing to do with architecture as such. So I shifted into that dimension of low-income housing, which very soon rolled into NGO work. I started doing some consultancy for an NGO and renewed contact with Charles [Box 4.1], who I knew from school. And then I got invited to be on the CHD board. During that time CHD grew rapidly, which was a good thing in terms of the organization. But it led to a growing professionalism. I’m getting more and more concerned that many of these people don’t really have the skills or interest they claim. It doesn’t pay as much as many jobs in Ghana would pay you but it is a fairly easy option, or it can be.

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Following his introduction, participants break up into small groups and are asked to reflect on these ideas, after which findings are reported and a discussion commences. Julia, the country director of a large international NGO, is first to talk on behalf of the ‘NGO perspective’, speaking out against government and donor policy: We recognize that there are different types of people here and we talked about the relation between NGOs and donors and government. In the context of Ghana there is a big difference between the theory of decentralization and the realities on the ground. Poor people have the rights to engage in decision-making and policy-making and there is a very big gap there. As an NGO representative, she equates government policy with ‘theory’, opposing this to the ‘realities’ that organizations such as her own have to deal with. Joy, another representative of an international NGO, is next to contribute, picking up on the same theme. The policies are there, she suggests, but in practice they don’t work: Right at the top, there needs to be involvement of civil society. And parliament being the forum. There should be room for civil society to get as near to the top as possible. There is some capacity already, but how to bring all of these things together and to put this rhetoric into practice? While NGO representatives take donors and the government to task for their lack of connection with ‘the ground’, a similar criticism is made of NGOs themselves. An eminent sociologist from a British university, asks rhetorically about the increasing ‘distance’ between policy and practice: This is really a question that I’d like to throw out. Has there in Ghana been a shrink back in contact between policymakers and poor people – the actual direct experience that people have with poor people? And is there a tendency to have more and more workshops in Accra and less and less contact between people involved in policy and those in the field? And if this is the case, then does it actually matter? You might say that it’s OK to have managers here doing things that can’t be done elsewhere. But the danger is that there is a loss of a sense of reality.

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Others take up the theme, talking of the increasing number of organizational and institutional ‘layers’ and the corresponding distance that is created between ‘policy’ and ‘the ground’. A number of NGO representatives are keen on the possibility of ‘bridging this gap’ by ‘sending policymakers back to the communities’. However, the donors are wary. They suggest the importance of ‘building connections’ with people at the community level, but insist on the desirability of their own detachment from this. The country director of a European donor agency suggests that the new policy of Multi Donor Budget Support4 raises new challenges. If donors are increasingly working with governments, trying to effect policy and achieve greater accountability, then this changes their focus: In the past we always felt we needed to know what was happening on the ground, so that we knew what the gaps were. But increasingly now, we don’t and so we depend on people like you more. Policy and practice are thus imagined as necessarily distinct ‘levels’ even if it is desirable to establish ‘connections’ and ‘links’ between these. In these exchanges a self-evident distinction between ‘policy’ and ‘practice’ frames a competing set of claims about the respective role of different organizations and individuals in the development process. While all share an understanding of ‘policy’ as the more abstract counterpart to the specificities of ‘practice’, interpretation of the relationship between these elements varies. For donors, policy and practice are imagined as complementary forms of endeavour. In this sense their own more detached perspective is a necessary counterpart to the practices of various other actors. By contrast, NGO critiques highlight how this language of ‘partnership’ leaves out asymmetries of power. Contesting this vision, they render difference in terms of dissonance, highlighting the extent to which the ‘theories’ of policy overlook the importance of ‘local practice’. NGO workers criticize government and donors as being ‘removed’ and ‘out of touch’. From this perspective ‘practice’ cannot simply be subordinated to ‘policy’. Using ‘practice’ as a rhetorical foil, NGO workers articulate a sense of outrage at the extent to which policy abstractions marginalize the very people they are intended to help. At times ‘practice’ is alluded to as the justification for NGOs’ own activities. In claiming that the voices of ‘the poor’ cannot be overlooked, NGOs also draw legitimacy from their own proximity to ‘practice’.

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Conclusion Approaching policy ethnographically enables a move from a concern with the content of particular policies to a concern with the epistemological forms and social contexts through which these emerge. This entails a parallel move from a focus on textual representations to a ‘sociology of the document’ (Mosse 2005a: 15). From this perspective the chapter questions the capacity of policy to determine particular outcomes. Policy does not reduce practice to itself: as a process policy seems to incorporate diverse contexts and relations as part of ‘its’ own operations, even as those operations shift in response to existing relations and understandings. While this perspective calls into question some of the claims that may be articulated in the name of policy, it does not participate in the ‘realist’ ontology of policy discourses. Rather than adjudicate policy with reference to ‘reality’, I have sought to highlight the various meanings and uses that such concepts acquire in various development contexts. Where ‘practice’ is understood as an ethnographic artefact (as opposed to an analytic strategy), the sociologically contested nature of the term becomes apparent. This approach calls into question any straightforward equation of ‘practice’ with the specificities of ‘reality’. While the interests and agendas articulated in the name of ‘practice’ are always particular, the category is not in itself specific. In the context of various development discourses, practice emerges as a prefabricated space: its meanings are recognized even before they acquire their particularities. Olivier de Sardan notes approvingly the persistent role that anthropologists have played in ‘calling back people to reality’ (2005: 4). Highlighting the disjunctions between policy and practice is one form these realist critiques have taken. However, if the content of such policy narratives may be of less consequence to the interests they serve than the forms through which they emerge (Riles 2001), such critiques face a twofold problem. On the one hand, academic critiques of policy have been drawn into the interventionist logic they have sought to critique; they have pointed to gaps errors and occlusions, while leaving intact the assumption that public intervention is required (Lea 2002: 10). On the other hand, in assuming that policy narratives operate on the same epistemological plane as academics (that policy is a simplified academic language), they have overlooked key aspects of the ways in which policy operates. Lea suggests that simplification is ‘not a moronic or robotic

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poor cousin to a smarter academic epistemology’ but a ‘parallel discursive activity fed by the same ability to comprehend detail and render it according to the discursive demands of the interactional present’ (2002: x). If this is the case, then effective dialogue between academics and policymakers will only produce genuine ‘engagement’, if we first understand the differences across which this takes place. It is to these themes that the conclusion turns.

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Conclusion: What Is to Be Done?

One afternoon I accompany Emily on the daily trip she makes to drop her two children off at school. She combines her work as a project officer for one of Ghana’s leading NGOs with domestic responsibilities for the loose network of extended family who live in her house. That is partly why she is late, and in a hurry; and that is partly why she is bemoaning the poor state of the roads. Although this frustration is particular, she sees it as an indictment of the country more generally. ‘I find it so frustrating that nothing in this country ever seems to improve. You think you are getting somewhere but then something happens – there is a new government or the donors change tack and then all the good work is undone.’ Later, in a more sanguine moment, she reflects on this frustration. ‘I think that the difficulty is that if you live here you have to accept things the way that they are. If you don’t do that then you just go mad – there is too much that needs doing and if you take that all on yourself ... Well there’s no way you can do it.’ But if fatalism is sometimes necessary for personal sanity, it is also problematic: ‘You see that’s the tension. Personally it might be better just to sit back and put your feet up – just accept that that’s the way things are. But if you’re committed to trying to change things for the better then you also have to hold on to your frustrations. You have to keep dreaming – have to keep believing – or else you have nothing. And if you dream you are often going to be frustrated by how things are and how they turn out.’ Emily articulates what I take to be a more fundamental tension for Ghanaian development workers. Regardless of ideological persuasion, they express commitment to the prospect of a different and ‘better’ future. They know that this future may not come true and are chastened by past experiences. They know that idealism alone will not be enough, and so they seek to find practical ways of implementing these. 161

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‘Practice’, in this sense, constitutes a constant attempt to close a gap between this future prospect and existing circumstances: an attempt to level the difference between ‘ideology’ and ‘reality’. By the same token, ‘ideology’ constitutes a constant opening up of this gap – a way of looking at ‘what is’ from the perspective of ‘what might be’; a way of perceiving reality in terms of absences, gaps and deficiencies that call for intervention. For these development practitioners, to hope for development is therefore to hold in abeyance the cynicism that sees change as impossible and the fatalism that sees change as the inevitable unfolding of processes beyond individual control. The hope is not naive, attended as it is by heightened awareness to the possibility of ‘failure’. For these development workers, ‘hope’ and ‘despair’ are not mutually exclusive alternative possibilities but inside out versions of one another: it is against the hope of a better future that development workers experience despair at the present; it is that despair that in turn stimulates further hope. Movement between these states can sometimes be experienced as personally frustrating or even upsetting. Nonetheless development workers locate the source of their quest for ‘action’ in this movement. They hold – and even cultivate – frustration as a stimulus to change. If this obviation between hope and despair constitutes a distinct way of perceiving the world, development workers also include themselves within that world. Ghanaian development workers are forced to work within particular institutional and political structures but do not embrace these structures uncritically. They are aware that the institutional apparatus and discourses through which development interventions emerge can be as much part of the ‘problem’ as part of the ‘solution’. At times they profess fear of getting ‘caught’ in the process: that their own actions and thoughts are carried by ideological influences beyond their control and at a tangent to their beliefs. Still, they hold that development presents institutional possibilities and resources that can be practically exploited for their own ideological ends. Confronted by an institutional reality that they see as problematic, they continue their work, claiming that doing something, however compromised, is better than doing nothing. Here, too, it is the hope of a better future that prompts despair about a lack of ‘ideology’ or the ‘selfish’ and ‘corrupt’ ways in which particular development professionals sometimes act. Development workers cultivate particular forms of moral self against which they measure their own and others’ actions. As much as they recognize the need to act on

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the world, they also recognize the need to reconfigure the people and institutions that ‘do’ the developing. Accordingly they recognize that hope for a better society can at times conceal a more selfish set of personal aspirations. They also recognize that interventions undertaken in good faith can at times have negative consequences. In moments of selfreflection and self-doubt, they even include themselves in these assessments. Still they hope for better forms of development, even while, and even because, they know that development has often ‘failed’. That hope sometimes originates in religious faith, and is also spoken of as a kind of faith. Since Ferguson’s (1994) seminal study of Lesotho, the metaphor of the machine has permeated the quest to understand development practice. If the machine’s effect is to remove politics from the ‘product’ of development, focusing on the production of development discourse, as Ferguson advocates, acts to make political dimensions reappear. This machinic imagination has been important in highlighting the role of systems and processes in development practice and in bringing to light some of practices that underlie surface representation. The metaphor conjures images of an impersonal set of systems and processes and of a disenchanted rationality. Even where people do enter this picture, they tend to be presented as cold and calculating – themselves dupes of bigger ‘social’ and ‘economic’ processes, or extensions of the logic of the global machine in which they participate. If development practice can usefully be imagined in terms of machinelike systems and processes, then my suggestion is that it is also important to consider the people who ‘operate’ these systems – and how and why they do so. A central argument of this book is that if we put these people back into our accounts, a different and more nuanced picture of development begins to emerge. We start to see the complex processes in which development workers have to engage in order to keep things working – how the coherence of development is wrested from the contingency of practice. At the same time, it becomes apparent that development organizations are populated by people with complex motives and ideological outlooks that elude any straightforward categorization. I hope this picture adds ethnographic nuance to existing understandings of development. By extension, since I suggest the two are indissolubly linked, I hope this also refines our understanding of the post-colonial public sphere. But how does an empirical description of ‘what is’ relate to development workers’ own concerns with ‘what could be’? What does this attempt to describe the ‘actual’ reveal about ‘the possible’? In other words:

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What is to be done? In the epilogue to The Anti-Politics Machine (1994), Ferguson raises precisely this question. In different ways, it is the central question that frames the activities that various development professionals engage in and the activities that academics undertake in trying to understand and analyse these. Ferguson’s own answer is to suggest that posed at the level of ‘the masses’ there is not one question but many. Different people face different problems. Since the people who actually face these problems are likely to know most about them, it seems presumptuous to offer prescriptions: The toiling miners and the abandoned old women know the tactics proper to their situation far better than any expert does. The only general answer to the question, ‘What should they do?’ is that: ‘they are doing it!’ (1994: 281) I take from this two important points: first, that if the question of what to do is to be meaningful, it has to be posed in specific terms; and secondly, that before proffering ‘solutions’ it is important to pay attention to what is already being done. Yet in his analysis of the activities of development organizations, this nuanced attention to the specificities of practice gives way to broadranging critique: There is little point in asking what such entrenched and often extractive elites should do in order to empower the poor [because] their own structural position makes it clear that they would be the last ones to undertake such a project. If the governing classes ask the advice of the experts, it is for their own purposes, and these normally have little to do with advancing the interests of the famous downtrodden masses. (1994: 280–281) This suggestion that the many organizations, activities and practices that go by the name of development are only a part of the problem seems unhelpful. As I hope my account makes clear, development comes into being as the intersection of a multiplicity of people, ideas, institutions and technologies. In engaging in the practices that bring these together, Ghanaian development practitioners are themselves asking and answering the question of ‘What is to be done?’ Even where they ask this in the

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singular (as if there were an answer), the situations in which they pose it are different. In practice, there are a multiplicity of ways in which the question is asked and answered. In relation to development professionals, as much as for ‘the masses’, I therefore propose that before asking ‘What is to be done?’ we first need to ask the question of what is already being done. In doing so it is unhelpful to pit the workings of ‘development’ against the activities and beliefs of ‘the masses’, as if the only important distinctions lay ‘between’ these. More helpful is to look at how different ways of enacting development draw together different groups of people with different consequences. Still the question remains: What does my account do?

Critical problems Perhaps primarily I hope that, taken in the round, it presents descriptive and analytic possibilities that have an effect on existing theoretical formulations, that is less a new theory than a way of re-perceiving what the role of theory might be. Ferguson’s (1994) deconstruction of development discourse has helped pave the way for much of the critical analysis that has followed. In this vein, ‘post-development’ critics have questioned received understandings of the concept of ‘development’. Rather than a benign force for good, ‘development’ has increasingly come to be understood as the very means by which powerful nations reinforce their economic and political power. In different ways, postdevelopment scholars have attempted to understand the mechanisms by which this occurs. Starting from the premise that the ‘power of development’ (Crush 1995a) derives from its capacity to ‘conceal’, critics have sought to ‘uncover’ the processes by which it ‘really’ works. In particular, post-development scholars have directed attention beyond the overtly neutral and objective language of development organizations to the political motives taken to animate these. If power is driven by disguise, then the role of critical scholarship is a critical unmasking of the political relations that underlie ‘surface’ representations. The postdevelopment critique can be seen as a ‘stripping back’ of the ‘myth’ of development; an attempt to set aside ‘surface representations’ in order to reveal the ‘real’ dynamics at work. The arguments and analysis presented in this book do not disprove these ideas. It has not been my intention to debunk such theories in the name of a more ‘real’ truth about processes and practices through which development works. Yet the tendency for scholars to engage with

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development through such forms of critical deconstruction creates problems. Although post-development scholars have roundly criticized the objectivist traditions of development, their own concern to locate the ‘real’ mechanisms by which such organizations operate works through a similar realist ontology. Development critics have assumed that the world is divided into fetish and fact, even as they have debated where this line is drawn (cf. Latour 2004). Development knowledge has been taken as a social, economic and political ‘construction’. In this way, critics’ own analytic tools (‘society’, ‘politics’, ‘economics’ and so forth) are ascribed an unquestioned ‘reality’ against which the knowledge and understandings of ‘development’ are debunked. Rather than debunk development, I have outlined how different people and things are gathered together in maintaining it (a stance that parallels Latour’s (2004) ‘new critical attitude’). Rather than reduce development to an analytically external reality I have tried to add to the reality of development by multiplying description of the practices, relations and ideologies through which projects practically unfold. Since the object of ‘development’ is produced through a multiplicity of ideas, people, technologies and practices, I have attempted to describe these practices without recourse to any singular logic, and without subsuming these to a singular theory. Attending to the multiplicity of realities through which development is produced is an act (cf. Mol 2002: 151–152); it is something I have done through multiple processes of writing and research. I hope this makes explicit what development practitioners leave unsaid. I have attempted to add to the understandings that development workers produce (documents, texts, discourses) in order to highlight the practices required to produce these. This has meant foregrounding the commonplaces of development practice: actions and ideas that go without saying because they come without saying (Bordieu 2003). In situating previously discrete practices and utterances alongside one another, their meaning is altered. Connections have been drawn out on the basis of connections latent in ‘the field’, though the result is not reducible to these. Accordingly I hope this account adds something new to the practices it describes, even as I am aware of all it takes away. Development paradigms shift with alarming speed. The history of development is littered with well-meaning theorists’ failed attempts to provide all-encompassing answers. New proposals proliferate; attempts to fill the ‘gaps’ that ‘failure’ creates. But if these failures are not so much theoretical failures as failures of theory (the quest for abstract, allencompassing solutions), perhaps there are already too many.

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Rather than a new theory, I therefore offer this account as an attempt to subtly re-perceive what already happens; to shift perspective so as to be able to see what already takes place but in a new light. I have done so with the intention of amplifying understanding of what is productive and useful about these practices, rather than in order to denigrate what is not (Mol 2002). This does not amount to a wholesale endorsement of ‘development’ – as though it were a unified ‘thing’ to be endorsed or denounced. As I have suggested, development involves the intersection of many people and things. Not all of them are ‘good’; but neither are all of them ‘bad’. I hope that part of the utility of the approach I have taken is in being able to differentiate the multiplicity of people, ideas and practices through which development is constituted, so as to move the discussion of ‘development’ onto a less abstract footing (Yarrow and Venkatesan forthcoming; cf. Quarles Van Ufford and Giri 2003). I am proposing that we try to recuperate a sense of the generative potential of certain understandings and practices that have tended to be overlooked in the constant search for a new policy panacea. This means recognizing that important complexities and ambiguities get overlooked when academics try to explain development as a singular, overarching system of knowledge. If this conclusion is what my account theoretically ‘does’, I hope it might in turn prompt reflection on how development could be done differently. My following suggestions are not intended as programmatic statements but simply highlight what I take to be latent possibilities. I outline these in relation to three key suggestions: 1. ‘Transparency’ is not the only kind of accountability. As this book has sought to make explicit, informal relations – friends, ‘contacts’, personal relations – are central to the enactment of ‘civil society’ and to the functioning of development organizations more generally. From the perspective of recent advocates of ‘good governance’, these relations seem problematic. They are not ‘open’ and ‘transparent’: inclusion or exclusion from them is not on the basis of a universal and explicit set of criteria. Yet the fact that they are not formally accountable does not mean they lack accountability; the fact that their usefulness is rarely made explicit does not mean that they are not useful. Informal practices and relationships may well be in the public interest, even if they are not publicly visible (Cohen 1981: 128). Indeed it is precisely their lack of formal visibility that, at times, enables personal relations to work effectively. (For example, maintaining autonomy from the state or from donors depends on being

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able to organize independently from these). This is not to suggest that ‘informal’ relations constitute an alternative to formal institutional procedures. Rather I want to highlight that these are mutually implicated forms of practice. Hence the existence of the former need not undermine the latter (DuGay 2000: 56). Given that the informal nature of such relations constitutes their very condition of possibility, there is clearly no sense in which their promotion could ever be a meaningful policy objective. However, recognizing the importance of these relations does make the case against the over-determination of policies that close down the space in which such relations operate and emerge. In particular, the normative valorization of ‘transparent’ relations under the guise of ‘good governance’ undermines the effectiveness of relations that do not conform to these logics. At best these initiatives provide a way of re-describing relations that already exist in terms more acceptable to an external donor audience; at worst the pursuit of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ undermines the very forms of relationship and practice required to bring this about. Perhaps in this sense, less policy might be better policy. 2. Embrace contingency. A variety of otherwise disparate accounts have assumed development to be an ordered and coherent system. This book does not dispute the existence of order, but takes this to be an active achievement of development practice. In other words, coherence is an outcome of ordering (Law 1994) activities that are not themselves reducible to the logic of an overarching system. Although this insight is effectively a description of a set of processes that already take place, it does have potential consequences for the way in which we understand, value and think about these. If coherence is ‘after the fact’ (Mosse 2005b) of the practices and relations that produce it, we need to pay more attention to the importance of these practices and relations. In particular I have highlighted the attempts of various development workers to ‘make things work’ in situations where no easy ‘solutions’ exist. This means valuing the contingent and sometimes haphazard practices through which people, technologies and artefacts are brought together. Here, again, it is clearly absurd to imagine that the promotion of such practices could ever be a meaningful policy objective. Rather I underline the point that if policy objectives over-determine the space in which development workers operate, valuable practices may be undervalued if not actively undermined.

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3. Less can be more. Scholars of development in general, and anthropological studies of development in particular, have been critical of dualisms and oppositions on the grounds that these conceal the complexities of social reality for development workers and for scholars alike (Crewe and Harrison 1998, Escobar 1995, Gardner and Lewis 1996). Rather than view these as opposed to ‘reality’, my account demonstrates how oppositions are in fact integral to the ways in which relationships are formed and negotiated in the context of development interventions. A focus on the related oppositions between ‘local’ and ‘global’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ and ‘policy’ and ‘practice’ highlights the complex organizational processes through which such oppositions are created and sheds light on the ways in which these are used to frame social relations and identities. My account demonstrates the relational ways in which oppositions are drawn upon, and the highly specific distinctions that they are used to make. Against the grain of recent post-development critiques, this perspective suggests that the extent to which such oppositions are useful or problematic, empowering or disempowering, can only be gauged in relation to specific encounters.

By way of an ending In grappling with the question of ‘what to do’ in the context of medical practice, Mol suggests: The question ‘what to do’ can be closed neither by facts nor arguments [...]. It will forever come with tensions – or doubt. In a political cosmology ‘what to do’ is not given in the order of things, but needs to be established. Doing good does not follow on finding out about it but is a matter of, indeed, doing. Of trying, tinkering, struggling, failing, and trying again. (2002: 177) This book offers an account of my attempts to grapple with a range of problems through a process of trying, tinkering and struggling in the context of my own encounters with the multiple forms that development takes; it is what I have tried to do with these problems. I remain acutely aware that it is not adequate to them: theoretical problems remain; social and political injustices persist. My modest hope is that the result helps others (even in disagreement), trying and tinkering with similar issues, whatever ‘ideological’ or ‘practical’ form that struggle takes.

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Postscript: Acting and Understanding

Understanding does not emerge in a vacuum; knowledge does not exist independently from the practices and relations through which it is produced. Throughout this book I have tried to show how this is the case for a variety of development activities. The same is also true for the academics who write, think and research in relation to these activities. Consequently I do not follow those, within both development and academia, who would see the contrast between these as one between ‘acting’ and ‘understanding’ respectively. Acting and understanding are indissoluble parts of both these forms of practice. At the same time, it is important to recognize that academics and development practitioners do not use knowledge in the same way: important because it gets to the heart of some of the problems and misunderstandings that have arisen in the complex intersections that emerge between these. Against a background of existing knowledge, both sets of activities constitute attempts to render this knowledge useful to the transactional demands of the present (Strathern 1991: 119). Those demands are not the same within academia and within development. This book follows academic conventions; it participates in epistemological practices common to other anthropologists and, more broadly, to other academics. The account that results is not ‘applied’: I hope it opens up ways of thinking that find uses in other people’s practices. But it does not provide analysis of where development has gone ‘wrong’ or suggestions for how it could be put ‘right’. In suspending criticism, I have attempted to apply development practice as a way of thinking through and with academic (specifically anthropological) problems. I have argued that the approach I have taken is distinctive, for the extent to which it defers critique as a way of apprehending more clearly the 170

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multiplicity of the practices it describes. But as an academic critique, its difference to other theories itself points to a shared context (Strathern 2006). Academics argue with one another; they relate on the basis of their differences. Against a set of shared disciplinary expectations, they seek to make their distinctive contributions visible. This entails an open-ended understanding of knowledge. There is always more to find out; always new perspectives to be explored. The difference between this form of open-ended enquiry and the kind of practices undertaken by development professionals is not simply a difference of knowledge – the kinds of understandings and texts produced. Rather it is a difference between distinct ways of drawing knowledge (textual or otherwise) into practices and relations (Green forthcoming). Development practice is not concerned with critique but with making knowledge ‘work’. As Green (forthcoming) argues, it utilizes forms of practice that are diametrically opposed to the practices of academics. Rather than opening up possibilities, the need for ‘action’ requires that they be closed down (Lea 2002, Riles 1998, 2001). The job of the ‘specialist’ or ‘expert’ is not to question but to provide discrete contributions in the context of already specified project objectives. With these contrasting orientations to knowledge in mind, it becomes evident that differences between academics and development experts are not simply disagreements: they are not simply different views or perspectives on ‘the same’ basic questions and issues. At stake are different ways of making questions and issues apparent; different ways of ‘doing’ knowledge (Green forthcoming). These differences have frequently been imagined to present intractable problems. Scholarly critiques of development point to overlooked complexities on the part of development policymakers and practitioners. Academics have criticized development (in terms of specific projects and the project of development more generally) for a failure to recognize the complexity of the situations in which development practice takes shape. Development critiques of academics frequently mirror these criticisms. Development workers I encountered in Ghana echoed a wider set of complaints in criticizing a tendency for academics to produce knowledge that is ‘useless’. Faced with such apparent incommensurability, it is unsurprising that academics have turned attention to closing this ‘gap’. Often this involves a commitment to making knowledge that is ‘useful’, and hence a movement towards the expectations of development practitioners. Correspondingly academic knowledge becomes more like development knowledge: bounded in ways that are oriented towards particular

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objectives. In this way ontological differences are flattened – rendered as different ‘perspectives’ on the same basic object. The suggestion offered here is rather different. Instead of trying to close the ‘gap’ between academic and development knowledge, I propose recognizing how their differences can be generative. This means understanding academia and development as different forms of practice. These do not simply represent the world in different ways: they enact it through distinct ways of doing knowledge. One way of recasting the distinction between academia and development is to say that they have different ways of doing difference. I have suggested that development is not held together by a singular perspective but rather by shared interests (ideological, political, economic and so on) that provide the basis for conversations and connections across radical difference. In a parallel way academics engage with one another precisely through their profound disagreements. In this light I suggest that what is needed is not so much a way to bring academics and development professionals together as a means of enabling engagement across disagreement and difference. If development is seen as a shared ‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2004), we can understand how common interests in the questions this provokes underscore different modes, methods and practices of relating to these. This book emerges in relation to a set of contexts that are partly shared with my informants. In the process of writing and research, the willing suspension of my own agency allowed me to be captured by those practices (Strathern 2006). Through my interest in various development actors, I was drawn into their agendas. The book participates in what it describes – another context in which the meaning of development is reformulated along slightly different lines. But at the same time, engagement with the practices of academics necessarily produces particular forms of detachment. I see these strategic discontinuities as important. The practices that enable an object to speak are crucial to what may be said about it (Mol 2002). Different practices make it possible to say, see and think different things. Returning to themes raised in the Introduction, if one of the principle problems with post-development critiques has been the extent to which this has erased a sense of ‘hope’ in the multiple activities through which development proceeds, it remains my own hope that this new critical attitude goes some way to restoring it.

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Notes Preface 1. In his study of the Iatmul of New Guinea, Bateson suggests: ‘I found that I could think of each bit of culture structurally; I could see it as in accordance with a consistent set of rules or formulations. Equally I could see each bit as “pragmatic”, either as satisfying the needs of individuals or as contributing to the integration of society. Again, I could see each bit ethologically, as an expression of emotion’ (1958: 262). In this vein, I see my own analytic concerns, as concretized in the division of chapters as different ways of imagining processes and ideas that during fieldwork were present side by side.

Introduction: Hope in Development 1. Bornstein similarly describes the ubiquity of NGOs in Zimbabwe which were ‘as much a part of the environment as foliage, or pavement, or cars’ (2003: 28). 2. During the Enlightenment, classical theories that located state-building as a cyclical process of expansion and decay were challenged by scholars such as Adam Smith who saw progress as the linear unfolding of the universal potential for human improvement. In the nineteenth century, these ideas were metaphorically extended through newly emerging ideas of biology – in particular Darwinian understandings of evolution as a process of cumulative development (Watts 1995). These ideas partly provided the justification for colonial interventions that in turn led to the reformulation of the concept. Where previously ‘development’ had largely been seen as an immanent process that societies were naturally driven by, progress was increasingly seen as an end that required active intervention. The idea of ‘trusteeship’ became central to the conceptualization of Great Britain’s relationship to its colonies, articulating the rationale that ‘developed’ nations had the moral duty and authority to act on behalf of the ‘underdeveloped’ world (Cowen and Shenton 1995). From the start, the imagined ‘development’ of the West was defined against the ‘backwardness’ of other parts of the world, with Africa positioned at the bottom of this evolutionary scale (Chabal 1996). In this sense, ‘development’ was not a sui generis concept ‘imposed’ on the ‘uncivilized’ world; the concept itself emerged in relation to knowledge of ‘primitive’ economies and cultural difference (Watts 1995). Understandings of Africa and development were inextricably entwined from the start. 3. These ideas provided the rationale for the creation of new institutional forms and along with them, new forms of international governance. Where the nation state became the main locus of development, new forms of trusteeship emerged through the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations. During the 1950s and 1960s, these and other organizations proliferated, 173

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Notes

imagined as benevolent providers of ‘expertise’ and ‘technical assistance’, and coordinators of the newly emergent international order. 4. In the latter vein, social science critiques of development have tended to focus on these issues at an abstract level, portraying development as an ethically problematic enterprise (Crush 1995b, Escobar 1995, Hobart 1993a). 5. Discursive analyses of development have tended to emphasize their textual and linguistic bases to the detriment of an understanding of the multiple forms of technology, artefact and organizational architecture through which these discourses emerge. Drawing on philosophers of science (Haraway 1997, Latour 1993, Latour 1999, Law 1994) and existing actor-network-theory based accounts of development (de Laef and Mol 2000, Jensen and Winthereik forthcoming, Kelly forthcoming, Mitchell 2002), I highlight the extent to which development knowledge is inextricably ‘social’ and ‘material’. Knowledge is not simply produced by people; it emerges in their interactions with diverse groups of people and things. At the same time, the prevailing discursive emphasis has tended to negate understanding of the inter-subjective contexts in which ideas of development take shape (Friedman forthcoming).

1

The Politics of Charity

1. The collapse of communist states during the late 1980s and 1990s led to renewed interest in the role of ‘civil society’. As faith in the socialist state crumbled, a variety of politicians, intellectuals and activists began to embrace forms of associational life that had previously been suppressed (Hann 1996). As representatives of an autonomous ‘civil society’, these were seen as the foundations for a more inclusive, less authoritarian political future. 2. The global rise of NGOs can be linked to the rise of neo-liberal thinking associated with the right-wing Reagan and Thatcher governments of the 1980s. Previously regarded as central to the realization of effective social and economic development, the state was redefined as one of the major obstacles, synonymous with inefficiency, bureaucracy and corruption. By the same token, ‘the market’ was held up as a paragon of efficiency and as the engine for growth. This ideology was practically implemented through the World Bank and IMF-led Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s. In return for major loan packages, these entailed radical economic reform programmes. State intervention was reduced through cuts in the civil service, privatization of state companies and economic ‘liberalization’. During the 1980s, these policies led to the global proliferation of NGOs: on the one hand reductions in state intervention created a pressing need for private organizations to take their place; on the other NGOs received increasing financial backing from donors, who saw these as more ‘innovative’ and ‘efficient’ alternatives to state-led development. 3. It is important to recognize that the ideological currents supporting the proliferation of NGOs are themselves plural. Support for NGOs also emerged from a variety of commentators, activists and intellectuals ideologically to the Left as NGOs were hailed as ‘bottom-up’ alternatives to various forms of post-colonial oppression.

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

In this vein Latin American liberation theologists, such as Paolo Freire, heralded NGOs as instruments for the empowerment of the poor in the face of forms of oppression they associated with state-based industrialization. In a related way, the ‘post-development’ critique that started to cohere in the 1980s often portrayed NGOs as the answer to the bureaucratic and technocratic forms of development associated with the ‘developmentalist state’ (Bonneuil 2000). In place of the ‘top-down’ approach that characterized much development thinking in the 1960s and 1970s, a variety of approaches including those that advocated ‘participation’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘gender sensitivity’ elucidated the need for more locally responsive, ‘bottom-up’ interventions. Frequently NGOs have been imagined as the means to further these ends. Limann was elected following the military coup of 4 June, in which Rawlings overthrew the military regime in power at the time, executed many of those associated with it and subsequently established democratic elections. When Rawlings subsequently overthrew Limann on 31 December 1981, he cited the Limann government’s failure to deliver on its promises to overcome political corruption and economic stagnation. Quoted in Nugent (1996: 5). The unattributed obituary given at the end of Hansen’s (1991) account of the period gives the following biographical details: Born in Ghana, he took his BA in Political Science at the University of Ghana, Legon in 1964, his MA in Uganda and his PhD in Indiana, USA. Committed to the ideas of Marxist theorists such as Fanon and Cabral, he saw his vocation as an intellectual in very practical terms and passionately believed in the need for African intellectuals to transcend the social contradictions and inequalities that plague the continent. Thus when he was offered a position in the PNDC government after the coup of 1981, he saw this as an opportunity to advance democracy within the country. When he realized the inability of doing so within this regime, he resigned and became a political exile in the UK. The actual number is subject to debate. Yeebo (1991), himself a JFM member, suggests that membership ‘mushroomed’. Nugent (1996) is more circumspect, suggesting that activities were confined to the Upper Region and Accra, estimating the total number (after Ray 1986) at less than 1,000. Members of the JFM believed in broadly socialist ideals and were particularly influenced by dependency theorists such as Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire (Yeebo 1991). Links between Rawlings and the JFM pre-dated the 4 June coup, many of its members having supported an earlier unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Acheampong. Rawling’s own ideological perspective itself partly derived from contact with the JFM. In line with the JFM’s neo-Marxist ideologies, Rawlings came to believe that Ghana’s problems were ‘neo-colonial’, with impoverishment of ‘the masses’ stemming from the actions of corrupt political leaders, policies of Western capitalist countries and profiteering multinational companies (Jeffries 1989, Yeebo 1991). It was therefore unsurprising that, following the coup of 1981, JFM members came out in vocal support of the new regime. In the wake of the revolution, support by the JFM was rewarded as a number of leaders were given influential posts within the new government. The chairman of the JFM, Chris Atim, was appointed to the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), set up to be the governing

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body of the revolution. Defence Committees were established by the regime, intended to enable ‘direct participation’ of the people in the political process. These organizations were coordinated by the Interim National Coordinating Council (INCC), in which many of the JFM leadership were given prominent positions. Following the revolution, membership of the JFM ‘mushroomed’ (Yeebo 1991). Hansen reports that as numbers increased, the organization was turned into a ‘bandwagon for individuals with all kinds of radical causes’ (1991:187). Underscoring these otherwise diverse ideologies was nonetheless a profound and widespread disillusionment with the manifest political and economic failures of the 1970s. 9. Founded in 1980, the NDM shared many of the ideologies of the JFM and also helped lend support to Rawlings following the coup of 1981. Set up by a group of lecturers and students based in the Law Faculty at the University of Ghana, Legon, the group espoused broadly socialist ideals, being particularly influenced by Dependency Theory and the writings of neo-Marxists. In contrast to the JFM, however, the NDM saw themselves as a more ‘academic’ and ‘reflective’ organization. 10. Where previously the state had been seen as synonymous with ‘development’, increasingly large state-bureaucracies were regarded as the very cause of Africa’s economic and political problems. Donor enthusiasm for NGOs partly resonated with sentiments expressed by Africanist scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. As the corruption, authoritarianism and weakness of state structures became increasingly evident during the 1970s, researchers began to focus on the various kinds of informal organization that continued to sustain social life and economic activity. During this period, NGOs proliferated throughout sub-Saharan Africa, encouraged by increasing donor funding. 11. These changes have had profound effects on the post-colonial African state, yet such organizations are not without precedence. During the colonial era, a variety of ethnically and professionally based associations arose throughout the African continent (Bratton 1989, Nugent 2004). These were often important in meeting health care, education and other welfare needs, minimally provided by colonial administrations. In a variety of countries these associations were an important focus for grass-roots demands for improved rights. In the late colonial period these often became the building blocks for nationalist political parties that were an important focus for independence movements (Bratton 1989, Manji and O’Coill 2002). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as the process of decolonization began to take root, the role of African states shifted. Where previously colonial authorities were primarily concerned with the extraction of raw commodities at the minimum of cost, the end of the colonial era saw a redefinition of the state as a primary locus of ‘development’. In this context, voluntary and community-based associations were generally seen as a barrier to state efforts to bring about the fundamental technological and economic changes that were seen to be required for African societies to achieve ‘modernity’. Although a variety of associations existed during this period with a range of economic and welfare functions, their developmental role was ignored, if not actively denigrated. To the extent that non-state actors were given a role in processes of development, these were largely the newly emerging professional

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Notes 177

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

development NGOs with their roots in the West. During the 1950s, charities such as Oxfam and Save the Children, initially founded to provide relief during the Second World War, shifted their attention to improving the welfare of people in parts of the world that were beginning to be defined as ‘Third World’. In particular these ‘war charities’ sought to ameliorate the problems of hunger, poverty and underdevelopment that the continent of Africa had become popularly associated with. In 1999, there were 350 officially registered NGOs. By 1999, when the last official count was made, the figure had grown to over 1,300 (GAPVOD/ ISODEC 1999). The current number is almost certainly significantly higher. The NDC is the broadly socialist party with its roots in the political movement that brought Rawlings to power in 1981. The NPP is a more politically conservative party that has tended to pursue more economically liberal policies. In this vein, a variety of commentators have highlighted the potentially positive contribution of NGOs in furthering a broadly ‘liberal’ project of political and economic reform. In particular, scholars have sought to assess their contribution to the economic and political development of Africa in terms of their role in furthering or undermining this political ideology. In an influential analysis the political scientist Gyimah-Boadi praises civil society for its role in dislodging ‘entrenched authoritarianism’ (1996: 118) and bringing about a transition to formal democracy, but is critical of the factors that have, in practice, undermined its autonomy. As well as highlighting the potential for ‘traditional’ ascriptive relationships (such as those pertaining to kinship and ethnicity) to undermine formal institutional procedure, he also notes that the absence of a strong economy has led to a weakening of individual and associational independence of non-state actors. Although from a rather different perspective, the political scientist Harbeson (1994) also frames his assessment of the political changes that arose in Africa in the 1980s in terms that clearly resonate with donor concerns. Though critical of earlier World Bank policies for their conflation of civil society with ‘the market’, his evident enthusiasm for processes taking hold at the time clearly resonated with a later emphasis on civil society for its role in furthering the World Bank ‘governance agenda’. While different commentators have therefore debated the extent to which NGOs in fact conform to international donor expectations, much of this literature is itself founded on broadly ‘liberal’ economic and political philosophy. By contrast a more radical set of critiques have highlighted the shortcomings of donor policy at a more profound level. In a variety of ways these have related the proliferation of NGOs to the globalization of Western economic and political models and hence the entrenchment of a profoundly unequal global order. In a particularly forthright critique, Manji and O’Coill (2002) argue that NGOs entrench neo-colonial forms of dependency, acting as a substitute for state welfare, much as missionary activities earlier acted as a ‘sticking plaster’ for colonial neglect of the welfare of colonial subjects. Rather than an autonomous and independent voice of ‘the people’, they therefore highlight how such organizations have been integrated into the broader ‘development machine’, through which Western hegemony

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is perpetuated over a passive ‘Third World’. Similarly, critiques internal to the NGO community have increasingly emphasized the potential for such organizations to perpetuate inequalities between ‘the West’ and the ‘Third World’. From this perspective, academic commentators have joined with aspects of the NGO community in highlighting the problems that attend increasing professionalization of the NGO sector (e.g. Edwards and Hulme 1995). As NGOs grow, they become increasingly technocratic and top-heavy. While funding from Western governments and international NGOs has enabled the expansion of the sector, NGO workers have themselves argued that often these relationships fundamentally compromise the autonomy and independence of recipient organizations. In particular, formal accountability to donors undermines accountability to the recipients and beneficiaries of NGO activities and to ‘the people’ in whose name NGOs claim to speak. For example, Porter (2001) critically comments on a situation in which NGOs in Ghana are increasingly bound by internationally derived agendas. Forced into monitoring and accounting to those who pay their salaries, she suggests NGO workers are increasingly less willing to express ideas that run counter to prevailing development ideologies.

2 Development in Person 1. In the early 1980s a number of factors including the low international price of cocoa, the expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria, and poor harvests caused widespread economic hardship (Brydon and Legge 1996). 2. The anthropologist Fortun (2001) also addresses these issues, albeit less explicitly, in the context of Indian activist networks in Bhopal. 3. Such discussions do not constitute life histories in the more restricted sense that many scholars define the term (e.g. Linde defines the life history as a specific mode of ethnographic data collection). However, they are underpinned by a similar logic in which biographical events are linked in an overarching frame. I therefore use the term ‘life history’ not simply to describe the narratives that developed through my own interviews with informants, but also to designate a wider set of conventions that regulated the way in which people choose to render biographical information about their own and others’ lives. 4. The anthropologist Weiner is critical of life histories, asserting that these are a poor substitute for the density of social life and the intimacy of social relations: ‘Formal procedures of interviewing, building life-histories, have the effect of forcing our interlocutors into artificial subject positions which are then taken as the positions they occupy in real life’ (1999: 77). For Weiner, the life histories are problematic in so far as the researcher comes to dictate the terms of engagement with the subjects of research, forcing a specifically Western form of narrative upon people who may not view their lives in these terms. This fear may be well founded. As anthropologists have reported in a variety of cultural contexts, it is a mistake to assume that people everywhere view biographical information to be interesting or revealing in the way that many in the West imagine (Abu-Lughod 1992, Hoskins 1998, Kratz 2001). However the interviews analysed in this chapter can be seen as part of a more

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Notes 179

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

3

widely recognized set of conventions, which cannot be set apart from ‘real life’ in the way that Weiner suggests. By way of an interesting contrast, the historian Metcalf (2004) suggests that for autobiographical accounts in the Indo-Persian literary tradition chronology is irrelevant since the essential personality is regarded as present from the start. Set up by many of those who had been active in the JFM. The historian Andrews (1991) describes how class is an important factor contributing to the radicalization of British Marxist activists. While lower-class activists tended to get involved as a direct result of the poverty they experienced during their childhood, those from middle and upper-class backgrounds converted as a result of exposure to intellectual concepts and abstract ideas. Many Ghanaian activists similarly located their radicalization in the conditions of their upbringing. Yet here the relationship between ‘class’ and radicalization is not as straightforward as Andrews’ analysis suggests. Among Ghanaian NGO workers and activists, social background was itself evoked in their own accounts of ‘conversion’. Here it was not a simple sociological reflex, still less as sociologically deterministic variable. Rather, it provided an idiom in which claims to legitimacy were made and, indeed, disputed. The historian Arnold (2004) similarly describes how Indian political activists in the 1930s premised their claims to political authority and national leadership on the basis of the ‘suffering’ that resulted from extended periods in prison. The ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’ in Ghana are often referred to by reference to Nkrumah and Busia respectively. Following Independence in 1957 Nkrumah was the first president of the country, advocating industrialization and development along socialist lines. After the overthrow of Nkrumah in the coup of 1966, military rule was established under the National Liberation Council before return to democratic rule under Busia. By contrast to Nkrumah, Busia employed a more liberal economic discourse and re-engaged with Western donor organizations such as the World Bank and IMF (see Bright and Dzorgbo 2001).


1. One of the country’s elite boarding schools. 2. The term derives from liberation theology. CFA members described it as an unveiling of social reality which precipitated and enabled social action. 3. Ewes are one of the ethnic groups that come principally from the South of Ghana. 4. As has been widely noted (e.g. Yeebo 1991) Rawlings, who came from the Volta region, was commonly imagined to favour Ewes, as reflected in the composition of the government and civil service. 5. Organizations in the Catholic Youth Movement to which many belonged. 6. The Asante are the largest ethnic group in Ghana.

4

Local and Global

1. Although see Henkel and Stirrat (2001) for a discussion of the religious connotations implicit in the approach.

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5 Indigenous and Western 1. In the context of these debates the term ‘traditional authority’ was used to refer to all forms of ‘traditional’ political institution. By contrast the term chieftaincy was understood in a more restricted sense to refer to the more centralized, hierarchical institutions associated with Akan ‘traditional’ political institutions. 2. A similar logic underpins the Ghanaian philosopher Gyekye’s (1996) account of the role of African cultural values in the creation of a viable ‘African modernity’. 3. A Ghanaian academic who lecturers in Communication Studies made some of these issues explicit during an interview. He described to me the problems created by ‘Western education’ in terms of its capacity to ‘confuse’ and ‘alienate’ people from ‘African values:’ ‘Our capacity to criticize is severely limited because Ghanaians are dependent upon the extraneous concepts of the British education system. No country has prospered by alienating its values: you borrow others to top-up what you’ve got.’ In this sense, ‘Western’ education and the introduction of ‘Western institutions’ were seen to inhibit the growth of the country, undermining the systems and ideas that preceded colonialism. From this perspective, education causes people to think ‘like Westerners’, creating a distinction between ‘African reality’ and the ways in which those with a ‘Western education’ make sense of it. Widespread discourses of Ghanaian elites thus employed a distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ perspectives to account for the country’s purported failings. 4. In the twi language of the Akans, ‘oman’ is used (among other things) to refer to ‘the people’, as distinct from those holding office; the ruler of an ‘oman’ is referred to as ‘omanhene’. 5. Kweku Ananse is a spider trickster figure central to many morally loaded Ghanaian folk tales. 6. The term ‘durbar’, imported by colonial administrators from India, refers to events at which all those from a village come together to discuss issues. 7. When Akan chiefs take office, they are said to be ‘enstooled’. The ‘stool’ both symbolizes and confers the chief’s status and authority (Sarpong 1971). 8. Fayemi et al. (2003) suggest in this vein that ‘the NPP is seeking to use its cosy relationship with the Asantehene as an example of governmenttraditional authority relationship’. 9. ‘The politics of Chieftaincy Politics’, Chronicle, 23 May. 10. Accra, the capital of Ghana, is popularly imagined as a place of ‘modernity’ and ‘Western values’.

6

Policy and Practice

1. Eshu Alegbara is a Yoruba orisha (god). 2. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development. 3. His critique paralleled many of the academic critiques that have been made of ‘participatory’ approaches (Chambers 1995, Cooke and Kothari 2001, Henkel and Stirrat 2001, Mosse 2001, Nelson and Wright 1995)

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Notes 181 4. Multi Donor Budget Support is an approach in which different donors support the government directly rather than undertaking their own projects and programmes. Benefits are imagined to include increased coordination between donors and the ‘empowerment’ of governments to make decisions for themselves. Critics suggest that the approach fuels corruption and inefficiency.

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Index abstraction see Simplification academia 64–5 accountability donor approach to 33, 77–8, 95, 98, 152, 158, 178 and good governance 77, 98, 99, 147, 152, 167–8 of government 34, 91, 128 and personal relations 78, 91, 95, 98, 152, 167–8 of Traditional Authorities 130, 141 Accra 48, 81, 109, 115–16, 142–3, 157, 180 action in activism 28, 60, 64–5, 69–72, 74, 82 in development 162, 171 in policy 151–2, 171 relationship to ideology 10, 64–5, 82, 83 relationship to theory ix, 170–2 religiously motivated 69–72, 82, 84, 88 see also compromised action activism covert 29–33, 66, 99 and/in NGOs 13, 21–3, 34–41, 44, 60, 62–3, 77, 96, 115 personal motivation for 52–60, 69–73 and personal relations 41–2, 94–7, 99 political 13, 20–7, 29–41, 43 (see also Progressive Movement) relation to donors 34, 35–6 relation to government 23–9, 50, 62, 66, 77 activist identity 46, 42, 74–5 see also activist ontology activist ontology 45–76 see also commitment; consciousness; engagement; experience; ideology; radicalism; sacrifice

actor-network-theory 174 Africa development/underdevelopment in 1, 3, 9, 31, 33, 77–8, 100, 130, 173, 176 elites in 1, 7–9, 46, 75–6, 79, 145 NGOs in 31, 75, 79–80, 100 personal relations in 79–80, 97–8 relationship to West 80, 130, 131–6, 140 as source of identity 9, 97–8, 131–6, 180 Afro-pessimism 8, 46, 75 agency 46, 73–4 aid see development Alleyne, Brian 46 Anders, Gerhard 147 Andrews, Molly 179 Anthropology and development x, 5–7, 9, 144, 159, 164, 170–2 Anti-politics machine, the 164–5 Asantehene, the 139–41 Bateson, Gregory 173 Bayart, Jean-Francois 8, 79, 100, 145 belief see ideology beneficiaries development construct 4, 112, 114 related/opposed to experts 13, 106–7, 110, 118 (see also expertise) Berglund, Eva 65 big man 8, 48, 121 capacity Building 78, 109, 130 capitalism x, 43, 135 see also neoliberalism Carrier, James 88 Castells, Manuel 122 Catholicism and activism 25–9, 30–2, 56, 59, 65–6, 69–71, 80–3

193

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194

Index

Catholicism – continued and NGOs 32, 42, 80–3, 89–94 see also faith; liberation theology; Young Catholic Movement; Young Christian Students Chabal, Patrick 75, 79, 100 Chambers, Robert 117 change, social/political activist desire for 65, 70, 71–3, 81–3, 161–2 in policy 149–53 chieftaincy 24, 119, 126, 128–31, 134–6, 138–45 see also Traditional Authorities Christianity see Catholicism civil society in Africa 8, 23, 79–80, 100, 177 and donors 23, 35, 43, 148, 177 and globalisation 35, 43, 135 and government 95 Ghanaian 34–41, 95, 97 independence of 38, 79, 87–8, 90–1, 95, 100–1 and neoliberalism 23, 177 NGOs as 23, 34, 43, 79, 100 and personal relations 8, 79–80, 88, 95, 96, 97, 167 class 24, 79, 85, 89 Cohen, Abner 98 coherence enacted through development xiv–xv, 6, 13, 43, 113, 146–8, 163, 168 enacted through policy 146–8 enacted through self-narration 51 colonialism 3, 141, 142, 173, 176 see also post-colonial Comaroff, Jean 80 Comaroff, John 80 commitment contested among activists 10, 56, 62, 63, 68, 74 and ideology 50, 63, 65, 89, 94 and radicalism 62–3 and sacrifice 46–50, 62, 65–9, 72 to social change 49–50, 52, 53, 56, 60–5, 70, 74 see also activism; consciousness; sacrifice

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communism 49, 59, 135, 174 see also socialism Community Based Organizations (CBOs) 113, 148 compromised action 23, 65, 101, 162 see also action conscientization 70, 83 see also liberation theology; social consciousness consciousness origins of 52, 55–6, 70 political 49, 51, 52, 116 social 27, 30, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 70, 116 see also activist identity; activist ontology consultancy 36–7, 65, 68, 116 contacts 92, 99, 148, 167 see also friendship; personal relations Cooke, Bill 110, 113 corruption in development 37–8, 68, 162 and personal relations 78, 83, 85, 91, 94, 97–8 stimulus to activism 25, 27–8, 59, 81, 120 coup, 31 December 20, 24, 26, 49, 62, 129, 175, 176 critique in academic scholarship 159, 165–6, 171 limits of 159, 165–6, 170, 172 culture of silence, the 31 Daloz, Jean-Pascal 75, 79, 100 Dalun 115–16 De Certeau, Michel 106 Democracy as activist aim 30, 48, 61, 66 and indigenous knowledge 128, 139, 142 and NGOs 23, 30, 38, 43, 79 dependency of Africa 8 In development process 8, 35, 43, 136–7, 147–8 despair in development 11, 44, 162 related to hope 2, 11, 44, 162

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Index detachment academic 172 in policy 148–51, 149, 153–4, 158 related to engagement 58, 86, 148–51 De Tocquville, Alexis 79 development ethics of 10–11, 74–5 and globalisation x, 36, 123–4, 147–8 history of 3–5, 173–4 personal understandings of xiii, 10, 27, 46–75, 89–90, 161–3 politics/non-politics of 5, 6, 13, 75, 110, 114, 124–5, 139, 146, 163, 165, 177 promissory potential of 2–3, 6–9, 11, 167, 172 public culture of 1–2, 14, 140–1 temporality of 45–6, 51–2, 69, 73–4 see also development knowledge; development practitioners development knowledge coherence of xiv–xv, 3, 13–14, 107, 113, 147–8, 163, 168 enactment of x, xi, 106–7, 145, 159, 165–6, 168, 172 material basis of 12, 106, 112, 174 multiplicity of x, xi, xiii–xiv, 6, 10, 124, 164–7, 169, 172 simplification in 12–13, 112–13, 159–60, 169 specificity of xiv, 6, 7, 13–15, 22, 106, 113, 124, 145, 163 development organisations see donors; NGOs development practitioners 1, 2, 5, 6, 12, 75, 110, 114, 122–3, 124, 163, 165, 168 Ghanaian 2, 10, 45–6, 78, 119, 121, 128–30, 131–4, 142–4, 161–3 documents 5, 12, 107–8, 111–14, 117–18, 128, 152, 159 donors, international 27, 97 activist views of 23, 34–7, 43–4 policies of 4, 14, 22, 23, 29, 31–2, 34, 77, 79, 99, 123, 126–7, 147–8, 153, 168–9 relation to government 34, 158

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195

relation to NGOs 22, 23, 31–2, 34–41, 43–4, 91, 92, 96, 98–100, 123, 155–8, 176 dualism see oppositions Dunn, John 118 Edwards, Jeanette 122 elites African 1, 7–9, 46, 75–6, 79, 145 critiques of 7–9, 78, 164 problems of critiques 9, 10, 14, 46, 75–6, 164–5 development 3, 5, 123, 145, 164 Ghanaian 10, 14, 127–8, 131, 145 engagement, in activist ontology 37, 41, 42, 49, 58 Englund, Harri 75 ethics 10–11, 74, 75 ethnicity and friendship 84–5 and public life 79–80, 83, 90 ethnography approach in book x, xi–xiii, 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 75, 100, 159 multi-sited xi–xiii exile 20–1, 27, 33, 35, 38, 58, 65–6 experience related to ideology 55, 56, 60, 64 as source of activism 49, 55–6, 60, 64 expertise 4, 13, 107–8 enactment of 105–7, 111–13 material basis of 106–7 extroversion 7, 75, 145 faith and development 69–73, 84, 89 in development 69, 163 see also Catholicism; Christianity Family and civil society 100 influence of 48, 53, 54, 67 Ferguson, James 75, 119, 163, 164, 165 Foucault 8 Freire, Paolo 25, 56, 82, 83, 84, 175 friendship 78, 83–9, 99–100, 167 ideological basis of 84, 85–6, 87, 93, 94 strategic use 41, 83, 87, 88, 92, 99 see also personal relations

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Index

Fukuyama, Francis 23 funding 35–7, 43, 78, 91–2, 100, 147–8 future hope in 2, 11, 40, 44, 161–2 visions of 2, 7, 11, 44, 69, 74, 161–2

Hobart, Mark 144 Hope in development 2–3, 11, 44, 162–3 in future 2, 11, 40, 44, 161–2 related to despair 2, 11, 44, 162 human rights 64, 75, 121

gender 60, 61, 67, 68, 69, 90 generational differences among NGO workers 62, 67–9 as source of conflict 67–9 global enacted through development 12, 14–15, 106, 110, 113, 116–18, 123–4, 148, 169 as identity 118–19, 121, 120–3 related/opposed to local 12, 106, 110, 113–14, 116–19 relational construct 12, 116–18, 119, 123–4, 148, 169 globalisation x, 22–3, 35–6, 124 and development x, 36, 123–4, 147–8 limits to theories of 124–5, 148 and NGOs 22–3, 35–6, 43, 174, 177 governance, good 4, 33, 79, 147, 152, 167–8 and accountability 77, 98, 99, 147, 152, 167–8 and civil society 23, 79, 41, 177 and indigenous knowledge 127, 128, 130, 139–40 government, Ghana civil society relations to 8, 22, 25–33, 34–8, 41, 50, 66, 87–8, 91, 95–6, 99, 157–8 donor relations to 34, 158 Traditional Authority relations to 139–41 Green, Maia 123, 171 Greenhouse, Carol 73–4 Gutierrez, Gustavo 84 Guyer, Jane 141

Identity of activists 42, 46, 74–5 contextual 12, 118, 122, 123, 144–5 of development practitioners 12, 41, 118–22, 133–4, 144–5 ideology in activist ontology 10, 45–6, 51, 64–5, 69, 74, 82, 162 basis of friendship 84, 85–6, 87, 93, 94 related to action 64–5, 83, 162 related to experience 55, 56, 60, 64 Independence of activists 86–7, 91 of civil society 38, 79, 87–8, 90–1, 95, 100–1 indigenous Identity related/opposed to western 127–8, 131–3, 136, 143, 144–5, 169 relationally constructed 142, 143, 144–5 of Traditional Authorities 142–3 used by elites 131, 133–4, 136, 144–5 see also western identity indigenous Knowledge 126 contested 126, 131 donor discourses of 126 related/opposed to western 129–31, 136–8, 144–5, 169 and traditional authorities 127–8, 139–44 Interim Coordinating Committee (ICC) 24 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 23, 29, 34, 78, 174, 179

Hannerz, Ulf 122 Henkel, Heiko 113, 179 Hansen, Emmanuel 24, 175 Herzfeld, Michael 98 history see life history

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June Fourth Movement (JFM) 24–6, 28, 29, 33, 60, 65, 94, 175–6 Karlstrom, Mikael 80

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Index knowledge academic 13, 64–5, 151–2, 159–60, 167, 170–2 development see development knowledge material basis of 112, 174 specialist/expert 105–7, 111–13 Kothari, Uma 110, 113 Kufour, John Kofi Agyekum 38, 41, 62, 140 Latour, Bruon 149, 166 Lea, Tanya 159 Left, the Ghanaian 21, 37, 62 Legon see University of Ghana Lewis, David 144 liberalism see neoliberalism liberation theology 56, 59, 66, 70, 89 life history narrative form 47, 51–2, 178 performance of 46–8, 73 related to national history 52, 73–4 temporality of 52, 73–4 local academic conceptualisation of x, 123–4 as development construct 117–18, 124, 169 identity 118–19, 120–3 knowledge 108, 109, 110, 112, 124 related/opposed to global 12, 106, 110, 113–14, 116–19 relational construct 106, 116, 118–19, 121–5 sensitivity to 115–16 Locke, John 100 Luhmann, Niklas 149 Market, the see neoliberalism Marxism in activist discourse 20, 49, 55–6, 60 Mc Caskie, T.C. 73, 143 mediation 134, 138, 140 methodology xi–xiv Modernization theory 4 Mol, Annmarie 169

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money activist attitudes to 37, 53, 62, 67–8, 135 morality see ethics Mosse, David 110, 113, 144 narrative, personal 10, 46–8, 73–5 form of 47–8, 51–2, 73–4 performance of 46–8, 134–5 see also life history National Defence Committee 20, 34 National Service 32, 54, 82, 116, 120, 156 National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) 25–6, 129 neoliberalism and development x, 4, 147–8 and NGOs 8, 23, 29, 31, 34–5, 43, 77, 174, 177 neo-patrimonialism see patronage networks, personal 4, 79–80, 87, 95 see also personal relations New Democratic Movement (NDM) 24–5, 28, 29, 33, 50, 60, 61, 63, 87, 94, 176 NGO movement in Africa 31, 75, 79–80, 100 in Ghana 22, 21–2, 31, 33–44, 78, 95, 99–100, 177 Globally 22–3, 174 NGOs academic critique of 43 auto-critique of 44, 54 as civil society 23, 34, 43, 79, 100 and globalisation 22–3, 35–6, 43, 174, 177 and neoliberalism 8, 23, 29, 31, 34–5, 43, 77, 174, 177 relation to donors 22, 23, 31–2, 34–41, 43–4, 91, 92, 96, 98–100, 123, 155–8, 176 relation to government 24–33, 77, 79, 87, 88, 91, 95, 99, 167 Nketsia V, Nana 134, 136, 139 Nkrumah, Kwame 4, 179 Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre 159

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198

Index

oppositions analytic use 144, 169 in Development 12–13, 119, 123, 144–5, 169 see also global; indigenous identity; indigenous knowledge; local; policy; practice; western identity; western knowledge Otumfour Osei Tutu II see Asantehene Pain, Robert 86–7 Participation 108–14 critiques of 110, 112–14 limits of critiques 112–14 and elite identity 114 past related to present 41–3 as source of identity 60 patronage 7, 8, 88, 152 patron-client relations see patronage Pentecostalism 53, 71–2 see also faith; religion personal history see life-history personal relations and accountability 78, 91, 95, 98, 152, 167–8 and civil society 8, 79–80, 88, 95, 96, 97, 167 and corruption 78, 83, 85, 91, 94, 97–8 donor perspectives on 77–8, 97, 98 ideological basis of 81, 87, 85, 94 as networks 4, 79–80, 87, 95 and public interest 7–8, 14, 77–8, 80, 85, 96, 98–100, 167 related to institutional practice 8, 78–80, 95, 96, 98–100, 167 strategic use of 77, 83, 87, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98 see also friendship; reciprocal assimilation; straddling Piot, Charles 123 policy 146–60 coherence 146–8 detachment 149–51, 153, 154, 158 enactment of 12, 146, 148–50 implications of book 167–9 politics of 146, 147, 150, 158 related/opposed to practice 12, 148, 154–9

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related/opposed to reality 146, 149, 150, 151, 153–4, 155, 157, 159 simplification 149–51, 159 political consciousness 49, 51, 52, 116 political reductionism xv, 163 of development studies 5, 146, 163, 165–6 of post-colonial studies 8 politics of development 5, 6, 13, 75, 110, 114, 124–5, 139, 146, 163, 165, 177 of participation 110 of policy 146, 147, 150, 158 see also political reductionism post-colonial theory 1–3, 7–9 problems of 1–3, 8–9 post-development theory 3–7, 13, 146, 165 problems of 5–7, 13, 165–7, 172 poverty development perpetuation of 4 as stimulus to activism 56, 58, 70–1, 84 practice related/opposed to policy 12, 148, 154–9 progress 3–4, 45, 73, 173 see also change; development Progressive Movement 28–9, 41–2 Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) 24, 66, 175 public good 8, 14, 46, 80, 85, 98 and personal relations 7–8, 14, 77–8, 80, 85, 96, 98–100, 167 public sphere Ghanaian 14, 22, 99–101 post-colonial 2, 3, 8, 79–80, 163 see also civil society radicalism 25–6, 55–6, 59–60, 62–3, 68–9, 74 Rathbone, Richard 141 Rawlings, Jerry 20, 22, 24–5, 27–30, 33–4, 84, 116, 129, 175 reality in activist ontology 162

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Index reality – continued analytic approach to xi, 12, 146–7, 159, 165–6 as development construct 146, 149–55, 159 reciprocal assimilation 79 relations see personal relations religion motivation for social action 69–72, 82, 84, 88 related to development 69 see also Catholicism; faith; Pentecostalism revolution, the 24–5 activist views 20, 25–8, 87 see also Rawlings, Jerry Robertson, A.F. 118 Romero, Bishop 30, 82 sacrifice in activist ontology 10, 46, 50, 65–9 scale 110, 118 self, the of development workers 10–11, 47, 51–2, 69, 74–5, 88–9, 162 moral/ethical 10–11, 62, 74–5, 162 narrative construction of 47, 51–2 related to society 52, 69, 74–5 Sillitoe, Paul 144 Simplification in development 12–13, 112–13, 159–60, 169 in policy 149–51, 159 social consciousness 27, 30, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 70, 116 socialism in activist discourse 20–3, 25–6, 32, 34–6, 55, 67, 68, 135 see also Marxism Stahl, Ann 118 state, the and civil society 79–80, 100 role in development 23, 173, 174 Stirrat, Roderick 113, 179 straddling 8, 14, 79 structural adjustment 29, 174 student movement 22, 27, 33, 129 Student Representative Council (SRC) 32, 61, 62, 88

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temporality of development 45–6, 51–2, 69, 73–4 of life-history 52, 73–4 theory as action x book’s approach to x, 165–7 Traditional Authorities and indigenous identity 142–3 and indigenous knowledge 127–8, 139–44 relations to government 139–41 relation to NGOs 127, 143 role in development 138–42 transparency see accountability Truman, Harry 3 United Revolutionary Front 30, 66 University of Ghana 25, 27, 30, 32, 61, 67, 82, 116, 129 University of Science and Technology 81 Village, the development workers’ relations to 56, 57, 58, 119, 121–2, 131, 133 Weiner, James 178 Werbner, Richard 46 western identity related/opposed to indigenous 127–8, 131–3, 136, 143, 144–5, 169 As relational construct 142, 143, 144–5 western knowledge Related/opposed to indigenous 129–31, 136–8, 144–5, 169 as relational construct 144–5 World Bank (WB) 23, 31, 33, 34, 37, 68, 78, 139–40, 174, 177, 179 Yankah, Kwesi 142 Young Catholic Movement 25–6, 28, 30–42, 68, 69–71, 82, 88, 89, 116 Young Catholics see Young Catholic Movement Young Christian Students (YCS) 25, 70, 84

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7/7/2011 2:33:58 PM

Development beyond Politics: Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana (Non-Governmental Public Action)

Critical Perspectives in Politics and Socio-Economic Development in Ghana

Contested Public Spheres: Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia

Aid from International NGOs: Blind Spots on the AID Allocation Map (Routledge Studies in Development Economics)

Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics

Hunger and Public Action (Wider Studies in Development Economics)

Culture and Public Action

Judicial Activism Reconsidered (Essays in public policy)

Action Learning, Leadership and Organizational Development in Public Services (Routledge Studies in Human Resource Development)

Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Politics, History, and Culture)

Beyond Morality (Ethics And Action)

NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics

Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics

Better Aid: Evaluation in Development Agencies

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America

Women's NGOs In Pakistan

Public Opinion in State Politics

Publics, Politics and Power: Remaking the Public in Public Services

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

NGOs as Advocates for Development in a Globalising World

Career Opportunities in Politics, Government, and Activism, 2nd Edition

Making Men in Ghana

Ancient Ghana and Mali

HIV AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa: Politics, Aid and Globalization

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

Foreign Aid, Self-Reliance, and Economic Development in West Africa:

Dams as Aid (Routledge Studies in Development and Society)

Culture and Politics in Economic Development

Development beyond Politics: Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana (Non-Governmental Public Action)

Critical Perspectives in Politics and Socio-Economic Development in Ghana

Contested Public Spheres: Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia

Aid from International NGOs: Blind Spots on the AID Allocation Map (Routledge Studies in Development Economics)

Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics

Hunger and Public Action (Wider Studies in Development Economics)

Culture and Public Action

Judicial Activism Reconsidered (Essays in public policy)

Action Learning, Leadership and Organizational Development in Public Services (Routledge Studies in Human Resource Development)

Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Politics, History, and Culture)

Beyond Morality (Ethics And Action)

NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics

Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics

Better Aid: Evaluation in Development Agencies

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America

Women's NGOs In Pakistan

Public Opinion in State Politics

Publics, Politics and Power: Remaking the Public in Public Services

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

NGOs as Advocates for Development in a Globalising World

Career Opportunities in Politics, Government, and Activism, 2nd Edition

Making Men in Ghana

Ancient Ghana and Mali

HIV AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa: Politics, Aid and Globalization

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics

Foreign Aid, Self-Reliance, and Economic Development in West Africa:

Dams as Aid (Routledge Studies in Development and Society)

Culture and Politics in Economic Development

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