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How Development Projects Persist
Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs
By Erin Beck Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6378-1
CHAPTER 1
SOCIAL ENGINEERING FROM ABOVE AND BELOW
In the village of Santana in southwestern Guatemala, Mariana placed chairs under the shade of a crooked tree so that we could sit and talk. Old Toyota pickup trucks rumbled past us, heading south to the large fields of sugarcane, cotton, coffee, or cacao that populated the nearby export agricultural zones. Mariana was a seventy-four-year-old widow, mother to six children who were grown with children of their own. Like her, most of her children were uneducated and had difficulty finding secure work. When I asked how many grandchildren she had, she flashed a smile missing a few teeth and sighed, "Ay, who knows? Many." When I asked her about her business, she looked over her shoulder into the small store that she managed out of the front room of her cinderblock house. Shiny bags of chips and small packages of sweets hung from the plastic strip dangling from the ceiling. A refrigerator with a condensation-covered glass door was sparsely stocked with bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite. "I hope God allows me to pay back what I borrowed," she said.
For almost a year and a half, Mariana had been receiving loans from an NGO called Fundación Namaste Guatemaya (Namaste). Namaste offered women small loans accompanied by classes on business and financial literacy and one-on-one meetings with business advisers who helped the women calculate their profits or losses and discuss strategies to improve sales or reduce costs. Namaste was the brainchild of a Californian businessman who valued specialization and the application of a business mentality to nonprofit work. Reflecting this history, Namaste focused "exclusively on helping women make profits from their businesses," as the founder explained in a 2010 staff meeting. This specialization was based on a model of "bootstrap development," which entailed a focus on the individual and a belief that, given the opportunity and resources, the poor could lift themselves out of poverty through their own entrepreneurship.
Roughly forty miles north of Santana lived Lorena, a thin Maya K'iche' woman who participated in a very different NGO. She wiped the dust off a plastic chair for me to sit on while she gathered items from a chest of drawers that divided her concrete house in two. She proudly displayed her products: colorful scarves from Taiwan that she bought in bulk to sell in the market; long strips of cloth that K'iche' women wrap around their waists as belts; reams of fabric that she sewed into aprons with the help of her daughter's dexterous fingers. Lorena was able to purchase these goods using a loan from a NGO called Fraternidad de Presbiteriales Mayas (the Fraternity). She needed every penny she earned to support her two daughters' studies because her husband was not there to contribute to their expenses. He was incarcerated about a decade previously, thus ensuring that the day-to-day struggles to provide for the family fell squarely on Lorena's shoulders. Shouldering the weight was difficult; because of an illness that affected her hands, Lorena was unable to perform agricultural or factory work, and because she only reached the third grade, steady employment in a nonmanual job had been hard to find.
Like Namaste, the Fraternity provided women with loans and classes. But whereas Namaste focused on business and financial literacy, the Fraternity required women to attend classes on a variety of topics, including Bible study and lessons about self-esteem, caring for the environment, and recapturing Mayan culture. Other classes taught women handicrafts, composting, and how to make and use organic fertilizers and prepare nutritious meals. The organization's roots informed its multifaceted approach. Indigenous women had previously organized in the Presbyterian Church to fight ethnic and gender discrimination and eventually separated to establish the Fraternity as an independent NGO. The NGO's policymakers believed one could not separate indigenous women's economic wellbeing from their emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being, or from that of their families, churches, and communities. They therefore pursued a holistic model of development — one that taught women to recapture their Mayan identities, value themselves, care for the environment, participate actively in their faiths and communities, and earn incomes in ways that were consistent with their cultural and spiritual beliefs.
Mariana and Lorena represent the very type of beneficiaries that many development interventions today target, especially those that incorporate microcredit, or the provision of small loans to impoverished borrowers who lack collateral. As women, they are seen as having greater levels of need because of unequal access to schooling, resources, and decision-making authority. Targeting women like Mariana and Lorena with loans is additionally seen as more efficient than targeting men. Based on their reproductive roles and gender stereotypes, it is assumed that women will channel economic benefits to their families and communities and manage their money more responsibly.
Namaste and the Fraternity represent distinct approaches to development that are common the world over. Namaste is a foreign-founded and foreign-managed NGO that operates according to a bureaucratic structure, leverages the market, and values specialization and quantifiable results. It embodies the push toward professionalization, results-based management, and social entrepreneurship in the field of development. The Fraternity, on the other hand, is a grassroots organization that adopts a multifaceted approach, criticizes neoliberal policies, and seeks environmental sustainability, cultural recuperation, and personal transformations — goals that cannot be easily quantified. It embodies the call for grassroots alternatives and culturally appropriate development. The contrasts between Namaste and the Fraternity inevitably lead to the question, Which type of NGO and which development model works better? Which more effectively empowers women, contributes to development from the "bottom up," and has the more meaningful impact in the lives of women like Mariana and Lorena?
This book makes the case that although these questions are central to the study and pursuit of development, they are the wrong questions with which to start. For too long, scholars and practitioners studying NGOs' development interventions have fixated on outcomes and have seen development projects as phenomena that happen to people like Mariana and Lorena, thus ignoring the ways that these people transform projects in practice. As a result, many have ignored questions that are analytically prior, namely, How are NGOs' development projects constituted in the first place? What determines what actually happens on the ground? Answering these questions requires delving into the sources of development models, the relationships between these models and the actual practices and meanings, and the ways that development projects are embedded in, and transformed by, particular environments and lives.
Once we get inside them, it becomes clear that development NGOs are not neatly bounded and fixed organizations, and their projects are neither linear nor predetermined. Long-term comparative ethnographies of Namaste and the Fraternity reveal the interactional origins of development projects and demonstrate that international trends, development models, and organizational characteristics influence, but do not determine, actual practices and experiences on the ground. This suggests that abstract debates about the "best" development models or approaches, detached from close analyses of practices and experiences, are misplaced. Thus, this book does not arbitrate debates about the value of different development models. Moving away from binary assessments of success or failure, it does not reveal the "best" strategy for development or empowerment, nor does it universally condemn or celebrate NGOs and microcredit. Instead, it addresses a significant gap in the literature between "increasingly grandiose vision[s] of international development" and "relatively low levels of transparency and clarity about how development institutions work" (Lewis and Mosse 2006, 15).
To that end, this book explores the diverse meanings, motivations, and strategies that are continuously unfolding under the label "NGO" and under the guise of development. It focuses on the interactions among international trends, local histories and contexts, and developers' experiences, alongside the quotidian interactions between development workers and beneficiaries. This analysis reveals that development interventions are not merely the implementation of technical plans or expressions of hegemonic tendencies. Instead, they are interactive processes in which multiple dispositions, interests, and meanings conflict, interlock, and interpenetrate, and in which accommodation, reinterpretation, struggle, and adjustment are ongoing (Lewis and Mosse 2006). What happens on the ground in the context of development is not only the product of international trends, development models, and formal policies; it is also shaped by the ways that various stakeholders creatively interact with each other and with materials (paperwork, databases, evaluation reports, and technologies) over time in a given context. Thus, we cannot ask what development does for people without also asking what people do for development.
This book focuses on various "types" of people as they affect and are affected by development interventions. Tracing the development "chains" created by Namaste and the Fraternity, it explores the meanings and practices of funders and policymakers, which in turn shape development and organizational models and strategies. Funders are those who contribute resources but who do not make organizational decisions themselves, even if they influence them explicitly or implicitly, whereas policymakers are those who craft NGOs' formal policies (regardless of the degree to which these formal policies reflect on-the-ground practices) and have final say over evaluation and hiring processes, among others. Tracing development chains to the ground, the book also focuses on NGO leaders, workers, and beneficiaries. NGOleaders (directors and upper-level management) often spend most of their time in offices and oversee operations acting as key brokers between workers and policymakers. Workers carry out development strategies in offices or communities, often interfacing with communities and aid recipients on a regular basis but having little say over formal policies or operations. When grouped together, these people — funders, policymakers, NGO leaders, and workers — are labeled "developers" in this book. Those whom developers target with goods or services are referred to as "beneficiaries." The degree to which developers actually induce development (however defined) is debatable, and of course, the degree to which those targeted by development interventions actually benefit varies. What is more, the term "beneficiary" implies an assumption of passivity this book is actively attempting to combat. Thus, although these terms appear throughout this book, readers should remain aware of these notes of caution.
Although they cannot reveal the "best" development model, case studies of particular interventions and organizations are still able to reveal generalizable conclusions about the nature of development. The comparative ethnographies at the heart of this study demonstrate that development projects represent social engineering from above and below. Those involved in development projects — developers and beneficiaries alike — leverage their respective expertise, networks, and meanings in attempts to bring about their visions of the good life, either for themselves or for others. Because there is always room for diverse actors to maneuver in pursuit of their own goals and meanings, and because those goals and meanings never completely overlap, development projects will inevitably be characterized by incoherencies and contradictions that interrupt clear, predictable paths between inputs and outputs or between plans and practices. Development is not one thing but many things to many people; that is why it is always decidedly "messier" in practice than on paper, and perhaps why it persists even when it fails to develop communities and countries.
DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS AS ONGOING INTERACTIONS
This book focuses exclusively on development as project-based, intentional activity with roots in the post–World War II intervention into the global south and NGOs geared toward development rather than advocacy and activism. However, some scholars focus on development as a long-term, ongoing process that alters the organization of economies, social relationships, and politics. These scholars often dismiss projects as irrelevant practically and theoretically because after six decades of internationally funded development interventions, "no country in the world has ever developed itself through projects" (Nyoni in Edwards 1989, 118; Cowen and Shenton 1996; Hart 2001; Banks and Hulme 2012). While initially there was hope that development NGOs could buck this trend by advocating for structural change, more recently, scholars have found that at best, development NGOs simply support alternative forms of project-based intervention (Bebbington, Hickey, and Mitlin 2008). Others have emphasized that governments, not NGOs and projects, develop countries, and have thus focused their attention on national economic policies relating to trade, fiscal policy, and the like, alongside state institutions, rather than development projects and NGOs.
If NGOs and their development projects do not contribute to national economic development and poverty reduction, why study them? Although they may have failed to live up to their stated goals, development projects and NGOs continue to exist, proliferate, and generate numerous effects. Regardless of the degree to which development "works" (i.e., does what funders and policymakers intend), it endures — affecting local economies, formal and informal institutions, social relations, and subjectivities (Viterna and Robertson 2015; Babb 1996; Schofer and Hironaka 2005; Leve 2014; Sanyal 2009; Swidler and Watkins 2009). And just as development affects people's lives in multiple, contradictory ways, people in the global south (NGO workers, beneficiaries, communities) transform development interventions and NGOs by interacting with them and assigning them new meanings and goals. Understanding how development projects and NGOs are transformed, leveraged, and appropriated, how developers and beneficiaries interact, and how interventions affect and are affected by local social relations is therefore key to understanding social reality across the global south.
Development projects of the kind explored here are often studied in one of two ways. Some scholars highlight the global politico-economic power structures in which projects emerge, and explore the various ways that development interventions involve technical solutions for inherently political problems, thus distracting from structural change and reproducing hegemony. Others focus less on structural conditions and more on local-level effects in the short and medium term. This latter group of scholars evaluates the effectiveness of development projects in achieving their stated goals with the hopes of distilling best practices. Yet both of these contrasting approaches risk reifying development projects and thus obscuring development's messy, power-laden processes and the diverse ways they interact with people's lives on the ground.
This book, by contrast, conceptualizes development projects not as prepackaged products that arrive in the global south from the global north, but rather as ongoing series of interactions in which diverse actors in the global north and the global south play an active role. In so doing, it demonstrates that by focusing on what development projects are supposed to do (whether it be reproducing neoliberal hegemony according to some, or lifting significant portions of the population out of poverty according to others), we overlook what development projects really do: namely, become imbricated in the daily strategies and meanings of diverse beneficiaries and developers operating in particular contexts in significant but unexpected ways.
When scholars and practitioners insist on reifying development projects and focusing on their (presumed or stated) goals alone, they blind themselves to the tensions inherent in development that allow projects, even those that fail to meet their intended goals, to be reproduced. Instead, by exploring development projects as emergent interactions among diverse actors, this book is able to uncover that even when international discourses shift, underlying mentalities and practices may persist, allowing development projects to endure in repackaged forms even if they have not led to widespread community or international development. Projects are repackaged, but not as the result of a worldwide conspiracy or because they are particularly effective. Rather, they are perpetuated as the accidental result of various actors pursuing their own goals in the context of development projects and casting a variety of outcomes as "success," thus obstructing critical reflection on the value of particular development projects, or of development projects generally. Policymakers and NGO leaders draw on their existing habitus (often shaped in previous development projects) to craft future projects and point to evaluations that leverage various measures of success to keep their jobs, get promoted, secure future funding, or feel like they are making a difference. The NGO workers look to projects as, among other things, a relatively rare source of steady or prestigious employment and often draw on and replicate strategies and meanings honed in their previous experiences in other projects. Meanwhile, beneficiaries attempt to leverage the latest projects to their benefit, learning how to skillfully manipulate developers' expectations, express the appropriate form of gratitude, or sidetrack projects to their own benefit so that they can view their participation as "successful" even when policymakers' stated goals are not met.
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Excerpted from How Development Projects Persist by Erin Beck. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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