Development Effects: Cosmopolitanism, Governmentality, and Angolan Engagements in the World

Peters, Rebecca A. Warne

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Year:: 2011
Contributor:: Peters, Rebecca A. Warne (creator); Smith, Daniel (Director); Townsend, Nicholas (Reader); Brown, Keith (Reader); Moorman, Marissa (Reader); Brown University. Anthropology (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Development; Economic development; Non-governmental organizations; Angola
Extent:: xvii, 260 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0125QW9

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Abstract:: Discussions around international development generally focus on whether, and why, interventions achieve their goals of improving health, political engagement or economic opportunity in poor countries. Critics charge that interventions grow in scale and complexity despite frequent failures and unintended negative consequences, while promoters respond that programs can have positive effects, working toward humanitarian goals that demand action. Such debates indicate that development work is a cultural field of experience and meaning in the globalized era even as these discourses overlook the subjective experience of the work in their focus on its "results." This dissertation examines the experience of development through an ethnographic case study of development workers as subjects to argue that their work internationalizes them, often reproducing many of the global hierarchies they would work against. The study is set in post-conflict, resource-rich Angola in 2008-2009. Embedded within a major democratization intervention, I lived, worked, and traveled with Angolan and expatriate development professionals to see development from the developers' point of view. I demonstrate the internationalizing and disciplinary effects of development work on workers themselves and on their communities of service by drawing on participant observation in the daily activities of implementation and administration of a nearly 17-million dollar program, from its organizational headquarters offices in Luanda to its field offices in rural Huambo and Bié provinces. I introduce the case by reviewing the growing scholarly literature that examines international development as itself a social field of meaning and experience. I contextualize the inception and implementation of the program within Angola's broader geopolitical history. I present individual development worker biographies to examine how staff members become development cosmopolitans through professional experience and how that cosmopolitanism is shaped by global inequalities, inadvertently replicating them. I detail a series of interactions among a group of program staff members to consider the mechanics of governmentality inside development organizations. I conclude by summarizing the effects of development work on local and expatriate staff as subjects, using the Angolan case to argue that development work is a social field that constitutes and constrains the contemporary human experience.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011)

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Rights: In Copyright
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Peters, Rebecca A. Warne, "Development Effects: Cosmopolitanism, Governmentality, and Angolan Engagements in the World" (2011). Anthropology Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0125QW9

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Anthropology Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Anthropology department.
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