Mosse, David - The Anthropology of International Development

AN42CH14-Mosse ARI 17 July 2013 12:23
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D V A
The Anthropology of
International Development
David Mosse
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London WC1 OXG,
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2013.42. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
United Kingdom; email: dm21@soas.ac.uk

by Utrecht University on 09/05/13. For personal use only.
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2013. 42:227–46 Keywords

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at aid, donors, expert knowledge, neoliberalism, poverty, ethnography
anthro.annualreviews.org
This article’s doi: Abstract

10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155553
This review examines how international development has been studied by
Copyright c 2013 by Annual Reviews. anthropologists, both as a particular form of institutional practice and as the
All rights reserved
terms of global economic and cultural integration. This review also explains
a shift from an anthropological critique of the discursive power of develop-
ment toward the ethnographic treatment of development as a category of
practice. It reviews research into organizational and knowledge practices, and
the life-worlds of “Aidland,” before turning to anthropological approaches
to neoliberal development and the new aid architecture and, finally, to three
significant current issues: the importance of business in development and
corporate social responsibility; the donor focus on poverty as the result of
the failure of government, conflict, and insecurity; and the growing impor-
tance of new donors such as China and India. This review concludes with
comments about how engagement with international development has en-
couraged reflection on the practice of anthropology itself.
227
Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print
INTRODUCTION
The anthropology of development raises core anthropological questions about human similarity
and difference, Western modernity, and the terms of economic and cultural integration. Interna-
tional development itself has a commitment both to the principle of difference and to similarity
(Corbridge 2007, p. 179). Its narrative of progress implies that difference is a deficit to be over-
come, whereas its narrative of emancipation implies that difference is sovereign self-determination
and thus present equality (Rottenburg 2009). The processes that weave around these contractions
in development interventions are complex, as are the debates within anthropology around de-
velopment as a (global) social imaginary and its political-economic effects. In a short review, it
is impossible to do justice to both these issues. My focus is on the former: the study, broadly
speaking, of development interventions—not particular sectors (education, agriculture, etc.) but
institutional practices, knowledge production, and social relations.
As studied by anthropologists, international development entails social processes that are in-
evitably transnational, intercultural, and multiscalar and involve the interaction and intermediation
of extensive actor networks, with different logics and life-worlds. For Olivier de Sardan (2005),
this characterization makes development not so much a separate object of study as a methodology,
a privileged empirical pathway through “a complex set of institutions, flows and actors” (p. 2).
The participation of anthropologists themselves in this field—as policy workers, consultants, or

advocates—first produced a distinction between pure and applied anthropology but now generates
new ethnographic knowledge and epistemological debate through variants of reflective “observant
participation” (Mosse 2006, Gow 2008, Rottenburg 2009). Building on recent more comprehen-
sive reviews of the field (especially Edelman & Haugerud 2005; also see Crewe & Axelby 2013),
this review examines current and interlinked trajectories of anthropology and development as its
object of study.
First, I provide some background on the anthropological critique of the discursive power
of development before exploring the shift toward ethnographic treatment of development as a
category of practice. Second, I focus on research into organizational and knowledge practices
and the life-worlds of Aidland before turning to the neoliberal context of a new aid architecture.
Finally, I discuss some current shifts: business at the center, governing at the periphery, and the
arrival of new aid donors.
BACKGROUND: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CRITIQUE

OF DEVELOPMENT
Anthropology has a history inextricably entwined with imperial projects of power, improvement,
and pulling people into the world system (Kuper 2005, MacFarlane 2012), but also with projects
of protection, solidarity, and liberation, which too often are occluded in its self-history of moral
improvement (Fairhead 2012). This mix produced distinctive American and European (British,
French, and German) traditions of development anthropology (Bierschenk 2008). Despite a long
engagement with varied open-ended meanings of development, in the 1980s anthropologists
turned to the invented idea of “big-D” development analyzed as a Foucauldian discourse “by
which the industrialized ‘West’ has continued to exercise control over processes of global change
in a postcolonial world” (Yarrow & Venkatesan 2012, p. 3; Escobar 1995).
At this key juncture, “[l]iberating anthropology from its own colonial past was inextricably
linked to the liberation of anthropology from the space mapped by the ‘development encounter’”
(Yarrow & Venkatesan 2012, p. 4; Ferguson 1997), which of course placed various anthropological
engagements in a new critical light (e.g., Escobar 1991). However, the primary concern of the
228 Mosse
critical anthropology was not development (that is, the institutions and programs that identify
themselves as such) but rather all that Development conceals—especially strategies of power.
Development agencies’ claims to improve the conditions of other people disguised governmental
practices of control and incorporation of “dangerous borderlands” into the state’s grids or global
capitalism (Ferguson 1994, Duffield 2002); and the material reordering of people’s resources
(land, forest, rivers) for extraction for metropolitan profit and the imposed knowledge hierarchies
led both to dispossession and to program failure (Greenough & Tsing 2003, Scott 1998). Such
political-economic effects occurred behind the antipolitics front of schemes for production or
poverty reduction (Ferguson 1994).
This critical anthropology of development is profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault’s work,
although the emphasis has gradually shifted from his earlier analysis of knowledge/power or dis-
course to his later work on governmentality and ethics, and from the effort to deconstruct de-
velopment as a historical system of thought to the interactions of various actors and systems of
knowledge (Rossi 2004a, p. 560). Li (2007b) considers a key governmental effect of development to
be what she refers to as “rendering technical,” that is, conceiving and rearranging social relations
and inherently political processes in alignment with expert designs. The idea of governmentality
has been applied (albeit with caveats) to the variety of shifting development discourses including
that of human rights, which Englund (2006) argues becomes disempowering in Malawi by ren-
dering technical structural problems, blocking collective action for entitlements and justice from
the state, and making the poor “prisoners of freedom.”
The explicitly bottom-up participatory approaches (partly inspired by anthropological valua-
tion of indigenous knowledge) were also seen as structured by, rather than changing, relations of
power (Cook & Kothari 2001, but see Hickey & Mohan 2004), albeit in complex ways. These
approaches might involve experts rendering technical (recontextualizing) indigenous knowledge
or institutions while engendering modern lifestyles and aspirations, putting in place new scales of
social distinction, but leaving wider structures unaltered (Pigg 1992, Mosse 2005a, Li 2007b). In
programs that emphasized self-help empowerment or community-driven development, the idea
of governmentality in neoliberal mode (Li 2007b) offered the ethnographic advantage (Englund
2006, p. 37) of simultaneous attention to faceless norms, rules, and audits of a plurality of author-
ities (state and nonstate) and to the self-regulating behavior of communities or individuals—that
is, the working of intimate “government at a distance” (Rose & Miller 1992). In Agrawal’s (2005)
longue-durée study of state-engendered environmental subjectivities (or environmentality) through
community forestry (in Himalayan India), it was new institutional practice that changed people’s
dispositions. Development as “an incitement to work upon oneself ” (Pandian 2008, p. 162) through
programs of practical and moral improvement is indeed a repeating theme, whether in forestry,
agriculture, resettlement, or other schemes, either modern or missionary (Moore 2005, Pandian
2009). This radical postdevelopment critique, however, ultimately concerned the political econ-
omy of truth and the centrality of development, not just “as an organizing principle of social life”
but in “the discursive imaginary” (Escobar 2012, pp. xii–xiii).
BEYOND CRITIQUE
Moving on from development as the cloak of power, ethnographers now argue that there is
much that “the language of disguise itself disguises” (Yarrow & Venkatesan 2012, p. 7). At worst,
the instrumentalism of development’s self-representation is replaced by a “power functionalism”
(Sahlins 2008, p. 12), that destroys rather than demystifies its object, development, whose agents
are denied reflexive intentionality or responsibility (Mosse 2005a, pp. 5–6). There has been a shift
to (re)engage with ethnographic meanings of development as a category of practice (rather than
www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 229
a category of analysis), that is, to understand the way in which development “becomes produced
and reproduced as a common sense part of people’s understanding of the world and their place
within it” and how “the delineation of [development] emerges from, and produces, particular
historical circumstances, particular cultural logics, and finally, particular subjectivities” (Curtis &
Spencer 2012, p. 179), which is how these authors account for a parallel recovery of politics as an
ethnographic subject.
Treating development as a category of practice involves, for one thing, reflecting on critique
itself as a kind of ethnocentric stance that unnecessarily ties insight to pessimism (Yarrow &
Venkatesan 2012, p. 6; Yarrow 2011, p. 3) or takes the discursive centrality of development as
self-evidently an orchestration of power with known effects. As Cooper & Packard (1997) point
out, “locating power does not show that it is determinant or that a particular discourse is not
appropriable for other purposes” (p. 3). Studies of aid-funded projects [such as those by Rossi
(2004b) and Mosse (2005)] show how marginalized people manipulate project discourses, for
example refusing the responsibilizing disciplines of participation while making claims (for em-
ployment, capital investment, or social protection from outsiders) within a very different politics
of patronage and allegiance. Here, development as a category of practice becomes more about
connection than community—something that Gardner (2012) also demonstrates in her long-term
study of the shifting fortunes brought to people in Sylhet, Bangladesh, by development as connec-
tion/disconnection, inter alia, through transnational migration and the arrival of a multinational
gas-extraction company in the locality.
Attention has also turned from development as an antipolitical mask of power to development
as the “practice of politics” (Li 2007b). Li’s historical anthropology of two centuries of layered
“betterment schemes” in Indonesia reveals the governmental “will to improve” as “a project and
not a secure accomplishment” (p. 10), many times evaded and contested. Bierschenk (2008, p. 10)
reminds us that the “antipolitics” international aid programs that render technical are readily
politicized by African elites to their own advantage, and Blundo (2006) points out that the fo-
cus on the state as a machinery of delivery and economic management, rather than as a political
entity whose legitimacy derives from development, has overlooked the intimate relationship be-
tween development and democracy. Studying the contentious history of fisheries in south India,
Subramanian (2009) concludes that “when we look at development practice, we see a highly charged
politically fractious process . . . tied up with the proliferation of new democratic institutions.
Development and democracy—the intertwined key words of postcolonial state formation—were
more than simply a cynical mantra for the consolidation of state power” (p. 145). The political
engagement of postdevelopment critics is itself evidence that the meaning, direction, and con-
trol of development are at the heart of contentious politics, bound up with identity, place, and
belonging.
Recent ethnography adds historicity and spatiality to anthropologies of development. Both
Moore (2005) and Subramanian (2009) analyze contemporary development politics as a layering
of earlier processes. In the first case, struggles over land by Kaerezians in eastern Zimbabwe recall
colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial dispossessions and repossessions; in the second, the artisanal
fishers’ fight against capitalist trawling makes sense only in terms of a history of claim making
whereby fishers emerge as subjects of rights in relation to other groups and institutions. In both
instances, the relational politics is distinctly spatial—embedded in landscape (Kaerezi) and spatial
identity (coastal-fisher versus inland-caste).
In these ethnographies, development, like rights or democracy, is not considered a regime of
truth “diffusing” from modern liberalism but rather provincialized as a particular dynamic cultural
formation that involves identity (caste or religion), occupation, and space-making (Subramanian
2009). This interpretation is a challenge to Escobar’s (2012) treatment of development as the
230 Mosse
“overall discursive fact” (pp. xiii–xiv). Development is not what the West does to “the rest” but is
“part of the postcolonial predicament” (Yarrow 2011, pp. 2–3).
Indeed, anthropologists have often discovered that ideologies of development are not experi-
enced as culturally foreign (Pigg 1992). The significance of a British aid project in Adivasi western
India emerged from an existing cultural logic that was contiguous with historical socioreligious
movements of self-improving change (Mosse 2005a). Such moral self-making of development
is not analyzable simply as people’s submission to a governmental “order of power identifying
their own nature as a problem” (Pandian 2008, p. 159). It may entail infusion of existing cultural
concepts (indigenous ideas of development), normative orders, moral imperatives, or theories
of social change, such as the Yoruba qlaju (enlightenment) analyzed by Peel (1971). Rather as
anthropologists have suggested in relation to religious conversion (Robbins 2004), development
(as idea and practice) is produced through existing categories, which it then transforms. Thus,
Peel sees qlaju—a particular system of metaphors and ideas about knowledge in relation to
power—becoming progressively linked to Western education and its place in Nigerian social
policy. In a parallel case, Pandian (2008) explains how ideologies of Tamil uzhaippu (toil) shift
from suffering to self-advancement. There is no intention here to sanitize the development
encounter of power. De Vries (2007) might say that the above examples illustrate how “the
development industry is parasitic on the beliefs and dreams of the subjects it creates” (p. 30).
His argument is, first (giving a Lacanian/Deleuzian twist to Ferguson), that development
is a “desiring machine” and that the lack from its failures drives desire, articulated through
imagination; and second, that a true politics and critique have to take desire for development
seriously and engage with development failure itself, not collude in the “banalization” of desire as
governmentality.
Other researchers focus on the local negotiation of development. Gow (2008) participated
in structured community planning processes in Nasa Indian (postearthquake) resettlements in
Colombia to discover a reworking of national development discourse in indigenous terms as the
desire for a certain critical modernity or “counterdevelopment” (cf. Arce & Long 2000). Here,
institutionalizing custom (language, law, shamanic knowledge) as indigenous education develop-
ment is the Nasa Indians’ means to simultaneously enter the dominant society and protect their
own. More generally, the place of development within indigenous activism or social movements
(such as the Indian Dalit movements) reveals development—demanded, resisted, reworked—as a
key site for struggles over the terms of recognition and of citizenship (cf. Ghosh 2006, Mosse 2010),
in which anthropologists may undertake deliberately partisan work with particular constituencies
(Dove 1999, Gow 2008).
In specific ways that have to be studied or engaged with, various political practices come to
be translated into development discourses (national or international), which then “provide the
means by which people negotiate and frame social, cultural and political differences” (Yarrow
& Venkatesan 2012, p. 9). The point, as Yarrow (2011) puts it, is that development is “not a
coherent set of practices but a set of practices that produces coherence” (p. 6). What elements
and relations of power are involved, who and what the significant actors are, what purposes are
served by processes of connection/disconnection (development/counterdevelopment), and what
autonomy is achieved or lost are not known in advance.
How such processes are conceptualized varies. Moore (2005), Li (2007a), and Gould (2007), for
example, have turned to Deleuze & Guattari’s (1987) indeterministic (but empirically discovered)
notion of assemblage (agencement) to capture the social and reflective processes of development. As-
semblage is the flexible, contingent, and continuous work of “pulling disparate elements together”
(ideas, moralities, artefacts, technologies, diffused agency, heterogeneous interests, destabilizing
elements) and is “always a process of ordering not order” (Moore 2005, pp. 24, 332). [See Li
(2007a) on community forest management as transnational assemblage, and Schwittay (2011a) on

the financial inclusion assemblage.]
Others follow Latour (2005) to argue that the material and conceptual coherence of a de-
velopment program is performed through political acts of “composition” by heterogeneous
actors/actants—the causal relations of the material world as well as intentional human actions
(Mosse 2005a). Latour (2004), moreover, claims “critique has run out of steam” and that we
should instead trace the policies, project designs, or technologies back to the human/object rela-
tionships (“the gatherings”) from which they come, not to deconstruct them but optimistically to
“strengthen their claim to reality.”
The difficulty with these “network approaches,” according to Escobar (2012), is threefold.
First, although these approaches carefully trace connections, they fail to adequately sort out those
that are powerful from those that are not (or are compromised) and therefore fail to allow a
political economy to the network [cf. Latour’s (2005) reverse position on the methodological
need to “keep the social flat”]. Second, they suffer a political failure in offering no significant
challenge to what exists, and they adopt a “hermeneutics of cynicism” about the possibility of radical
change. Third, because they choose not to perceive the uni-versality of Western development (or
modernity) and the cultural hegemony by which it becomes the translator of ideas, experiences, or
dreams (that upon which counterwork must be performed), these ethnographic approaches cannot
grasp or support genuinely different perspectives as the basis for culturally variant alternatives to
development (Escobar 2012, p. xv). However, other anthropologists point to the significance of
“engaged universals” (Tsing 2004) such as rights discourses (human rights, indigenous rights,
etc.) in articulating difference, in mobilizing claims to resources or recognition, and in forging
alliances with global networks. Of course, such connections are disjunctive (“frictive”; Tsing 2004)
as well as productive [as situated anthropologies of rights, codes and categories, and claims in
various fields show (e.g., Crewe & Axelby 2013, pp. 107–30; Ghosh 2006)]. In an interconnected
world, development agendas do not only travel; they interact with historical-cultural formations of
identity, rights, and development, which are then in turn “globalized” through advocacy chains (the
activist networks on Dalit rights and development I am currently studying being a case in point).
Having broadly set out the (not uncontested) basis for examining development as a category of
practice, in the remainder of this review I narrow the focus to anthropological studies of the thought
and practice of international aid organizations and their changing political-economic context.
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: INSIDE THE BLACK BOX

Whether as outsiders or as insiders with biographical access, anthropologists have examined the
program practice and processes, the life-worlds, and the politics of the apparatus of interna-
tional development through a growing body of so-called aidnography (Gould & Marcussen 2004,
Kontinen 2004, Mosse 2011a). Theoretical influences have diversified from the Manchester School
“interactionalist” focus on expert-community interfaces (e.g., Long & Long 1992) to shifting iden-
tities and brokerage in development (the Francophone Africanist literature; e.g., Bierschenk et al.
2002) to more recent actor-network theory approaches (Lewis & Mosse 2006a).
Opening up the black box between policy intention and social effects, and asking how de-
velopment works, has produced descriptions of the inner working, organizational practices, and
discursive repertoires of state and nongovernmental organization (NGO) bureaucracies (Hilhorst
2003, Watkins et al. 2012). Among examples of the intermediate connecting points (and the cor-
ruption) that constitute programs and public services are the complex bureaucratic arrangements
for donor-backed neoliberal reform in Senegal, studied by Blundo (2006), who shows how this
project itself produced (or incentivized) informal privatization, criminalization, and the rise of
232 Mosse
auxiliary revenue–controlling agents (touts and brokers). As Quarles van Ufford (1988) observed,
bureaucracy is not itself an instrument of policy because “bureaucracy is an independent genera-
tor of ideas, goals and interests” (p. 77). Gupta (2012), for instance, explains how writing (words,
statistics, and registers) constitutes bureaucratic action while impeding delivery. Others too reveal
the work of development as institutionally directed and socially agentive writing by examining
documents as sets of social relations or by describing the social production of numbers, which
are privileged in translocal development planning because of their capacity to strip out context
(Harper 1998, Smith 2006, Rottenburg 2009, Mosse 2011a, Gupta 2012).
Organizational theory has helped anthropologists show how bureaucratic systems (NGO or
state) tend to prioritize their own internal “system goals” (of maintenance and survival) over
meeting official policy goals (Mintzberg 1979, via Quarles van Ufford 1988). Moreover, the “in-
stitutional organizations” that typify the field of international development are those that are
compelled, “[to] serve first and foremost the legitimation narrative assigned to them by their
[political] environment” (Rottenburg 2009, p. 68), which contains such a diversity of competing
interests that these official narratives are characterized by vagueness and ambiguity. The result
is pervasive disjuncture in development order (Lewis & Mosse 2006b). The things that make
for good policy—which legitimizes and enrolls diverse supporters and interests—are not those
that make projects practicable; “good policy is unimplementable” (Mosse 2005a). Alternatively,
as Rottenburg (2009) puts it, there is a “loose coupling” of official representations (goals, struc-
tures) and actual organizational practices, which draws ethnographic attention to the trading zones
and translation practices—not the objects or actors but “what occurs between them” (p. xxvi)—
that Rottenburg so skillfully explores through his fictionalized account of a donor-financed water
sector–reform project in East Africa.
Ethnography shows that policy designs have to be transformed through translation (Latour
2005) into the diverse interests and meanings of actors that a program brings together. Loose cou-
pling distributes agency and permits multiplication of the criteria of, and claims for, success; a phe-
nomenon that Bornstein’s (2005) ethnography of religious NGOs in Zimbabwe shows allowing the
state to secure legitimacy by taking credit for NGO programs. Loose coupling facilitates interna-
tional development’s contradictory commitment to difference and similarity, progress and emanci-
pation, efficiency and local ownership, by allocating incongruous principles to separated contexts,
mediated by consultants and various “ceremonial facades” (Rottenburg 2009, p. 70). Anthropol-
ogists thus describe the entirely reversible institutional processes through which projects become
real (i.e., produce coherence) through the work of generating and translating interests, enrolling
supporters, and stabilizing interpretations and representations so as to match (for a while) events
to prevailing policy theory, which is usually the most urgent and practical action (Mosse 2005a).
DEVELOPMENT’S EXPERT KNOWLEDGE

Such research has changed the way anthropologists view expertise and policy, especially in light
of Mitchell’s (2002) argument that as a sphere of rational intention, policy does not precede
and order practice but rather is produced by it, grounded in particular interests, contingencies,
and exclusions. In similar vein, Rottenburg (2009) insists that the “technical game” that arises in
development cooperation (the antipolitics discourse) “is not an instrument of hegemony, but rather
the only code available for carrying out transcultural negotiations under postcolonial conditions
and the norm of reciprocity” (p. 142).
Other researchers focus on processes at the global centers of policy making (see the con-
tributions to Mosse 2011a). Some are concerned with the interlinking of expert knowledge
and the power and legitimacy of key institutions [e.g., Goldman (2005) on the World Bank’s
environmental knowledge and St Clair (2006) on its economic knowledge]. Others study
extrainstitutional or transnational networks of policy-shaping experts [e.g., Wedel (2000) on the
corporate/public boundary–crossing “flex nets” shaping 1990s US economic aid to Russia]. A
third group of researchers have studied “paradigm maintenance” within and between interlinked
organizations: the everyday practices of professionalization, ideological control, and groupthink;
the self-disciplining incentives of career building (e.g., Uchiyamada 2004); or risk-dispersing
reliance on templates that give development models resilience, despite contradicting evidence
[as Stiglitz (2002) shows for World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) market
liberalization models], and to which international development organizations, lacking democratic
accountability to citizen beneficiaries, are especially susceptible (Wade 1996, Woods 2006).
Rich ethnography exists on the institutional shaping of policy ideas (Douglas 1986), and the
social agency of concepts and their artifacts (documents) as translators of interests. Examples
include the social making of economic facts in the IMF (Harper 1998), human rights economized
as risk management at the World Bank (Sarfaty 2012), and the instrumentalization of equity
(McNeill & St Clair 2011) or society as social capital (Bebbington et al. 2004); the latter concept
here works socially to protect a vulnerable group of noneconomists rather than as an instrument of
World Bank power through depoliticizing development (Harriss 2001). It is precisely as an effect
of privileged analytical forms and aesthetics (network, bracket, matrix) that Riles (2001) analyzes
professional knowledge in her ethnography of women’s NGO networking.
Anthropologists are, of course, also interested in the effects of international development’s
context-free “traveling rationalities” (Craig & Porter 2006), which assert the formal over the
substantive and the categorical over the relational (Eyben 2006) and that bury political debates in
results management and the framing of self-disciplining indicators for everything from economic
growth to governance and human rights (Merry 2011). One effect is the dominance of the universal
logic of institutional economics and law, as well as the marginality of anthropology itself as a
critical ethnographic discipline, even though the numbers of social scientists within agencies
such as the World Bank have soared (from 1 in 1974 to more than 450 in 2004; Mosse 2011b).
Here their role is not to clarify processes of power or loose coupling but to facilitate those of
development negotiation, especially by rendering technical “the social” for project investment
through conceptions such as social capital (Li 2007b). Or, when anthropology performs its earlier-
allocated expert role of interpreting development failure in terms of local culture, Rottenburg
(2009) notes, it “provides a valuable service to the self-staging of development cooperation” (p. 73).
Another effect of expert knowledge is the denial of history (Lewis 2009, Woolcock et al. 2011),
which is the practice, as Pritchett & Woolcock (2004) put it, of “skipping straight to Weber.”
This practice involves clothing institutional solutions that actually emerged from histories of trial
and error, politically driven experiments, conflict, and struggle in the language of bureaucratic
rationality; and part of the solution is to hide this fact (Pritchett & Woolcock 2004, p. 201). An
example is the sort of neoliberal rewriting of the history of capitalism in rich countries that Chang
(2002) describes in Kicking Away the Ladder.
In addition to exploring the social origins and undisclosed baggage of international
development’s traveling rationalities, anthropologists show how these are unpacked into the
social/institutional interests of local collaborators, generating complex and unintended effects [see
Craig & Porter (2006) on neoliberal reform in Vietnam, Pakistan, and Uganda; Anders (2010) on
“good governance” reform in Malawi; and Schwegler (2009) on pension reform in Mexico]. These
are interpretive accounts of policy that, as Shore & Wright (2011, pp. 8, 14) propose, treat policies
as traceable actants within actor networks having complex effects at different sites—organizing
categories and action, mobilizing, demobilizing, introducing new techniques of self, producing
contestation—while also being altered by relations with other actants (people, objects, institutions)
234 Mosse
through processes of translation across varied interests, genres, and meanings. Instead of an
independent force imagined in models of policy transfer or implementation, policy is a mode of
connection or alignment (between agents, institutions, laws, technologies, and discourses) within
development’s assemblages, articulated through political economy (Shore & Wright 2011, pp. 8,
14).
SOCIAL LIFE IN AIDLAND

Ethnography now turns to the lives of development workers themselves—NGO employees,
consultants, expatriate aid staff, volunteers, and globally networked aid professionals—and to
the social and cultural practices of Aidland (Fechter & Hindman 2011, Mosse 2011a, Fechter
2012; also see Stirrat 2008). A sociology-of-science approach (Verma 2011) traces aspects of
development knowledge (e.g., epistemological closure, policy harmonization) to the sociality
of aid professionals: well knit, class closed, and culturally enclaved in capital cities; globally
connected and permanent; but locally isolated and transient (Eyben 2011, Mosse 2011a).
Contrarily, Lewis’s (2011) life-history project shows that despite converging policy ideas on
poverty at home and abroad, the social-institutional boundaries between UK voluntary sector
and overseas development NGOs is entrenched.

Yarrow (2011) suggests a refiguring of the anthropology of development around the moral
complexity and meaning making of its workers. He insists that the motivations, optimism, activist
histories, and the faith and friendships drawn from personal narratives of Ghanaian NGO leaders
be taken seriously, not displaced by political critique or an “Afro-pessimist” view of self-serving
personal relationships (cf. Bornstein 2005). van Gastel (2011) uses life histories to trace politically
communicated, ambiguated, and fragmented Dutch aid policy back to the integration of private
“dreams of development.” More of this literature is trying to get behind heroic or cynical rep-
resentations to the social conditions of overseas aid labor (the effects of hypermobility, visibility,
interstitial positions, audit pressures, worker failure, gender roles, and racialized relations),
unpicking experience-framing concepts such as (in)security, “guest-hood,” and nostalgia (contri-
butions to Fechter & Hindman 2011, Mosse 2011a). Some of this research foregrounds personal
agency and responsibilities, processes of professional or moral selving, friendship work, and the
care of the self as an aspect of the care of the other (Fechter 2012; cf Quarles van Ufford & Giri
2003).
However, as Lewis et al. (2008) note, when the whims, motivations, and failings of personalities
become central in the story of development, fiction has a descriptive advantage. Fiction also
sidesteps the dilemma that the things that are of interest to the anthropologist of development—
informal relationships, unanticipated events, divergent views—and from which she develops an
analysis that fulfills her professional identity are the very things that, when publicly available,
threaten the reputation of development professionals or institutions. No doubt it is partly
the urgency of stabilizing inherently fragile representations in international development that
generates such abundant reflexive backstage self-criticism and irony, hence the many aid worker
blogs (Fechter 2012) and dissident accounts published after a delay (e.g., Griffiths 2004; also
see Mosse 2011a). This is a world of carefully negotiated knowledge into which anthropologists
(with their different epistemological assumptions) must enter prepared for strong responses to
their ethnographic accounts, which claim authority but look like dangerous evaluations aligned
to narratives of blame and may well mobilize objections (Mosse 2006, Lashaw 2012). Meanwhile
concern arises about whether this looking inward has diverted anthropological attention away
from the wider context of development within neoliberal political economy and the reproduction
of (global) inequality.
NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT
By the turn of the millennium, deregulatory adjustment and economic liberalization had
turned national development into a matter of creating the conditions for attracting mobile
capital to enclaves of production of labor-intensive goods for global markets, such as garments
in Bangladesh and telecommunications in Bangalore (Ludden 2005); mining and oil-boom
investment hopped over large areas of “unusable Africa,” bypassing the national development
framework (Ferguson 2005). In Collier’s (2007) influential framing, the “bottom billion”
live in the unintegrated fringe or under the curse of ungoverned resource extraction. The
anthropological critique of projects and bureaucratic power has had to give way to ethnographies
of the loss of state power in the government of development; to its dispersal to NGOs, donors,
social entrepreneurs, and private-sector providers (Li 2005); to state withdrawal and reliance
on informal institutions (e.g., in rural Uganda; see Jones 2009); to the hollowing of the official
state (in India), surrounded by powerful brokers, contactors, and crooks who constitute a
shadow state run for private benefit (Harriss-White 2003); and to the centrality of informal
“social structures of accumulation” (caste, gender, and religion) in regulating both markets
and the state (Harriss-White 2003). In the age of neoliberal reform, the terms weak state,
fragile state, crisis state, and collapsed state are especially prominent in the development policy
lexicon.
Anthropologists are among those examining the social irrationality of a neoliberal logic that
selectively integrates into markets, reduces social protection, casualizes labor, and increases in-
equality and distributional conflict, among other ill effects of capitalism in its millennial (mes-
sianic, salvic) manifestation (Comaroff & Comaroff 2001, p. 2; Ferguson 2006; Greenhouse 2009;
cf. Robinson 2002). Whereas Marxian perspectives emphasize the underlying advancement of
capitalist class power (Saad-Filho & Johnston 2005), anthropologists often focus on the effects of
neoliberal forms of governmental power: the regulated autonomy and responsibilization of social
space (Kingfisher & Maskovsky 2008). They have observed the demobilizing effect of develop-
ment through marketization as the “appropriation and co-option of pre-existing cultural and social
achievements” (Harvey 2003, p. 146) that deplete numerous livelihood systems. Elyachar (2005)
accordingly critiques NGO microenterprise initiatives among craftsmen in Cairo and the rubric
of productive social capital that undermines relational value (evident in the “evil-eye” discourse
on selfish accumulation).
However, anthropologists also find people resisting new consumer subjectivities [e.g., Coelho
(2005) apropos water privatization in Chennai] and workers refusing to police themselves [as
Gupta (2012) observes in rural Uttar Pradesh]; although, neoliberal developments may also shape
the modes of resistance and mobilization, as (among others) Steur (2011) shows in her account of
social movements in Kerala that turn from socialist to indigenist form. Gupta (2012) argues that
such friction, also arising from gender, caste, or political alignments, “impedes and defers” the
relaying of Foucault’s modalities of government in development (p. 261).
Anthropologists indeed have reason to be wary of recourse to metanarratives of neoliberalism
in understanding “violence against the poor” (Gupta 2012, pp. 273–74). Gupta (2012), for exam-
ple, discovers continuity in the key effect of bureaucratic arbitrariness and neglect on either side of
a major ideological policy shift from state welfare to “empowerment” in Indian projects targeting
rural women and children. In parallel, Cross (2010) shows that precariousness and political sub-
jectivity among workers within a so-called special economic zone in south India differ little from
those among the informally regulated majority beyond it: Neoliberalism is unexceptional (cf. Ong
2006). The normal absence of state provision, Ferguson (2010) notes, is the context of schemes of
direct cash transfer in South Africa that use mechanisms of the market to drive poverty reduction;
236 Mosse
he argues that such schemes should be considered problem-solving appropriations of neoliberal

arrangement in the absence of state care.
These examples show that neoliberalism, like development, fails to become a stable object
of anthropological critique (Ferguson 2010). Some apparently neoliberal practices such as audits
in China, as Kipnis (2008) explains, may even be enactments of state socialism. Mitchell (2002)
challenges us to examine neoliberalism, or even capitalism, beyond the frame of its own self-
representation. His studies on Egypt show that privatization and the “free market” program
there abstracted from and misrepresented the actual “multilayered political readjustment of rents,
subsidies, and the control of resources” (Mitchell 2002, p. 277). His point is that all economic
activity is socio-political being dependent on forms of law, government and corporate power as well
as nonhuman elements (pp. 289–91). Further, like projects, neoliberal marketization can also be
examined as an actor network (Çalışkan & Callon 2010) so as to discover asymmetries of power in
valuation and the unequally distributed agencements (arrangements or assemblages) that lie behind
market descriptions of the autonomy of calculating agencies (Çalışkan & Callon 2010, p. 13).
From Wacquant (2012) comes a different point. Anthropologists will not solve the problem of
a fabricated notion of universalized market rule with the vague concept of flowing “calculative no-
tions, strategies and technologies,” as Wacquant sees Ong’s (2006) “global assemblage” approach.
Neoliberalism is something specific, namely a reengineering and redeployment (not dismantling)

of the state, among other things, both to support commodification (the extension of markets in all
spheres) and to curb the social turbulence caused by neoliberal policies of reregulation through
penal policy (Wacquant 2012, p. 72). The resulting double-figure “centaur” state—neoliberal at
the top and penal at the bottom—is familiar to economically transforming countries such as India.
Here, Gupta (2012) argues, the state has been restructured in favor of industrial capital in ways that
sharply increase inequality, first through barriers to employment for less-educated, lower-caste,
rural poor in the fast-growing knowledge industries, and second through the reallocation of
property rights in favor of extractive industry and infrastructure in the tribal periphery (Breman
2003, Padel & Das 2010). In the main, democratic pressure for legitimacy directs industrial tax
revenue to huge increases in state welfare programs. But where industrial development threatens
survival in the tribal periphery, an armed Maoist insurgency now prompts a military “staging [of]
the sovereignty of the state” and a “securitization” of development (Gupta 2012, p. 286; also see
Chatterjee 2008, Shah 2010). The governance of development through market-led growth strate-
gies, democratization, investment in social protection for those adversely affected, and the securiti-
zation of dangerous poverty on the periphery aptly describes international neoliberal development.
THE NEW AID ARCHITECTURE

Beginning in the 1980s, international development policy progressed through addition: structural
adjustment plus governance plus participation plus poverty reduction (Bierschenk 2008, p. 10). By
the late 1990s, governments of poor countries were offered conditional finance to develop their
own overall strategies for growth and poverty reduction [through budgetary support or poverty-
reduction strategy papers (PRSPs)] in line with neoliberal globalization—making “markets work
for the poor.” The overriding question was how market-led development was to be governed. The
preferred solutions—regulatory institutions, decentralization, democratic process—were harmo-
nized through new donor coordination (OECD 2005, Eyben 2007).
Anthropological analyses here return to concerns with power and discourse and, given how
“transnational linkages in the movement of ideas, material resources, technologies and person-
nel are critical to the care of populations,” to the debatable idea of “global governmentality”
(Gupta 2012, p. 239; also see Watts 2003 and Gould 2005). Gupta (2010) argues that the PRSP
measures promoted by the World Bank and the IMF frame poverty as a national problem in ways
that remove global inequality and the political economy of capitalism from the public agenda,
thereby diffusing demand for change in global institutions such as US and European agricultural
subsidies, the externalization of pollution costs, and restrictive trade regimes. Meanwhile, Craig
& Porter (2003) suggest that the ranked goals of global economic integration, good governance,
poverty reduction, and safety nets “[represent] an attempt to generate a level of global to local
integration and discipline and technical management of marginal economies, governance and
populations unprecedented since colonial times” (pp. 54–55; cf. Ferguson & Gupta 2002, p. 992).
Ethnographic research on the documents and practices of PRSPs suggests the replacement of
old-style structural adjustment conditionality with the internal discipline of audits and indicators
that do the political work of building compliance with international financial institution (IFI) de-
mands into the fabric of national administrative orders (Anders 2005, Gould 2005, Mosse 2005b,
Soederberg 2006). The question of the global governance of development has taken anthropolo-
gists into a range of international institutions (e.g., IFIs, the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, other United Nations bodies) and to the
local framing of global norms, standards, protocols, and supranational legal regimes (e.g., patent
law, tax law, trade liberalization, industrial licensing norms). Governance questions highlight the
political evasions of ethical consensus, categorical imperatives, and translations (Goldman 2005,
Müller 2008, Garsten & Jacobsson 2011); scattered sovereignties and manipulations by “cun-
ning states” that new development regimes produce (Randeria 2003); and the way rule making
for global governance builds partisan interests into the universal principles and common-sense
models while deflecting attention from monopolistic, oligopolistic, or ungovernable international
markets (Soederberg 2006, Mosse 2005b).
Anthropologists examine the delicate work of reconciling disciplining aid regimes with the
high-profile political commitment to national sovereignty and country ownership through rubrics
of partnership or capacity building (Dahl 2001, Gould 2005, Mosse 2005b, van Gastel & Nuijten
2005, van Gastel 2011). They find aid officials’ field experience narrowed to familiarity with
“the patterns on the carpet of the Ministry of Finance” (Eyben 2011, p. 144) but also discover
interinstitutional complexity as a new fieldwork site. Placing herself amid the electronic and
social flow of aid harmonization, Pollard (2009) reveals that donor-coordination efforts in Jakarta
so complicate relationships that doubt (about intentions and responses) itself becomes a means
through which institutional power operates.
CURRENT TRENDS: CORPORATIONS, CONFLICTS, AND CHINA

Politically threatened under conditions of austerity; dwarfed by the giants of climate change, the
rise of China, new conflicts, or transnational migration; and attacked on all sides for having perverse
effects (Easterly 2007, Moyo 2010), Western aid claims a shrinking footprint, now repurposed as
part of promoting commerce (old tied aid) or soft-power foreign relations. Three recent trends
are worth highlighting.
Business at the Center: Corporate Social Responsibility and Bottom

of the Pyramid Capitalism
First, business has moved into development. Donor programs involve more public-private part-
nerships (PPPs) that use markets for service delivery in health or education [see van Gastel’s
(2011) ethnography of a contraceptive marketing PPP], and at the same time, nonmarket moral
logics gain visibility within corporate capitalism. This merging of aid and business draws together
238 Mosse
anthropologies of development and corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Rajak 2011, Gardner
2012). Some anthropologists study the array of international codes and ethical standards for pro-
duction and trade that are drawn into development debates under the slogan “Trade, not aid.”
Studies on, for example, south Indian textiles (De Neve 2009), Costa Rican coffee (Luetchford
2008), and Kenyan flowers (Dolan 2008) reveal brokerage and power inequality in accessing fair-
trade markets and the disciplining of local producers by traders higher up the chain that produces
ethical value and serves the “redemption” of wealthier consumers (Rajak 2011, p. 7; also see De
Neve et al. 2008).
Corporations have also made themselves development agencies, setting and implementing
agendas (Rajak 2011, Dolan et al. 2011, Schwittay 2011a, Gardner 2012). Rajak’s (2011, pp. 11,
13, 323) point, from research on the mining giant Anglo-America, is not to judge CSR as either
a new ethical turn or a veil for profit but rather to show how the performance of CSR enables
corporations to extend authority over the social order at different levels, to tap the development
expertise of other institutions (states, NGOs), and to render commercial the problem of poverty—
that is, to frame it in alignment with corporate agendas captured in the unintentionally revealing
slogan “Make poverty business.” This goes to the heart of the wider institutional assemblage (Dolan
2012, p. 4) labeled “bottom of the pyramid” (BoP) capitalism (Prahalad 2005), through which,
Dolan (2012) argues, development itself is outsourced to the “under-utilised poor” through the
figure of the door-to-door sales woman bringing Coca-Cola or Avon products to retail black spots
in South Africa and Bangladesh, or Hewlett-Packard’s “digital brokers” in Costa Rica (Schwittay
2011b), all working within corporate, NGO, and development agency arrangements. Such “BoP
entrepreneurs” are analyzed as both instruments and beneficiaries of processes that change donor-
recipient relationships, create “legibility” to global business, produce entrepreneurial subjectivities
and recode products in ethical terms, while at the same time dividing, differentiating, and depleting
aspects of social life (Dolan 2012).
Governing at the Periphery

Second, because business is centralized in mainstream development, aid donors are redirecting
their attention and resources to frontline states (e.g., Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq) and to zones of
ongoing conflict (inaccessible during the Cold War) on the periphery of global capitalism (Duffield
2002, 2007). Treating poverty as the result of the lack or failure of government and of conflict and
insecurity (see World Bank 2011) interlinks goals of program delivery for basic needs, security,
and state building, thereby blurring the distinctions between development, humanitarian relief,
and military intervention (Duffield 2002, 2007; Howell & Lind 2009). The post–September 11
securitization of development involves a new “liberal interventionism” that more obviously serves
political agendas through “preemptive development” (Soederberg 2004) and ultimately aims,
Duffield (2002, 2007) suggests, to render populations governable.
Behind this focus on the periphery, Duffield (2002) sees also at work the normativity of global
market integration that regards conflict and new wars, social regression, and criminality as the
effects of exclusion from globalization—an idiom of “borderland barbarianism” justifying capi-
talist incorporation on the grounds of security. He suggests, on the contrary, that conflict may
signal resistance to or disengagement from liberal market values through forms of flexible mod-
ernization [informal transborder networks, extralegal shadow economies, even Islamist nonliberal
reinvention (Duffield 2002, pp. 1,052–54; Watts 2003, pp. 7–11)]—variants of postdevelopment
strategies of difference (Escobar 2012). This analysis also points to a wider anthropological critique
of the way durable poverty is exceptionalized rather than understood relationally as also caused or
deepened by ordinary processes of capitalism (Mosse 2010).
New Donors
Finally, anthropologists have mostly assumed that international aid is about the affluent West and
its “others” (Mosse 2005a, p. 1), but “[g]lobal development is no longer governed by Northern
countries, and the subjects of IFIs are as likely to include Greece and Italy” (De Hart 2012,
p. 1360). Aid donors such as China, India, and Russia have entirely different histories and con-
cepts of development cooperation that are only now being explored (Gray 2011, Mawdsley 2012).
China’s economic diplomacy has drawn the most attention (especially in Africa), but Indian and
Russian forms of development cooperation also depart from the specific moral framing [or purifi-
cation (van Gastel 2011)] of aid as the unreciprocated gift (Mawdsley 2012; cf. Bornstein 2012)
and focus instead on ideas of mutual benefit, South-South solidarity, and national sovereignty
while refusing the Western aid packaging of agendas on governance, environment, or human
rights (Mawdsley 2012). However, debate on Chinese aid, or a distinctive “Beijing consensus”
model of development invoked as the other of Western aid, indicates the need for a differentiated
ethnographic description of alternative development meanings and relationships (Mohan 2008,
Brautigam 2009). The image of Costa Rica’s national stadium, designed and constructed by the
Chinese from imported materials and labor, in which “China appears simultaneously as a First
World donor and the quintessential Third World labourer” (De Hart 2012, p. 1371) suggests a
significant refiguring of the anthropology of development.
CONCLUSION
Development may or may not be a distinctive apparatus that is separable from other historical
relations between state, society, and culture, but it can be studied as the fraught institutional effort
to make this so (or to resist it)—a scenario in which anthropologists are themselves implicated
as policy makers, project workers, advocacy activists, or critics. The usefulness (or otherwise) of
anthropology to international development would be the subject of a separate discussion. Is an-
thropology the source of expertise on local culture; is it the capacity to build social knowledge
into policy or to promote a localist stance? Such questions enter this debate (Sillitoe 2007). The
anthropology of development does something different. It offers a way of examining the dilemmas
of power and knowledge, sometimes generating, along with development counterparts (agency
staff, campaign organizations, or members of communities), reflective awareness of the relational
context of thought and action through collaborative research for organizational learning (e.g.,
Eyben 2006). Whatever such opportunities are (and a good deal more work remains to find varied
constructive modes of engagement with international development), encounters with develop-
ment policy and its parallel ways of “doing knowledge” begin to question anthropology’s claim
to epistemological privilege (Green 2009). These encounters introduce questions about anthro-
pology’s own epistemic conduct that are explored in some interesting ethnographic experiments,
such as Rottenburg’s (2009) fictionalized account, which attempts a symmetrical treatment of the
anthropologist as one among many analytical voices that recount the unhappy unfolding of an aid
project in Africa.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
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AN42CH14-Mosse ARI 17 July 2013 12:23

United Kingdom; email: dm21@soas.ac.uk

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2013. 42:227–46 Keywords

This article’s doi: Abstract

The participation of anthropologists themselves in this ﬁeld—as policy workers, consultants, or

BACKGROUND: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CRITIQUE

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 229

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 231

(2007a) on community forest management as transnational assemblage, and Schwittay (2011a) on

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: INSIDE THE BLACK BOX

DEVELOPMENT’S EXPERT KNOWLEDGE

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 233

SOCIAL LIFE IN AIDLAND

and overseas development NGOs is entrenched.

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 235

he argues that such schemes should be considered problem-solving appropriations of neoliberal

Neoliberalism is something speciﬁc, namely a reengineering and redeployment (not dismantling)

THE NEW AID ARCHITECTURE

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 237

CURRENT TRENDS: CORPORATIONS, CONFLICTS, AND CHINA

Business at the Center: Corporate Social Responsibility and Bottom

Governing at the Periphery

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 239

signiﬁcant reﬁguring of the anthropology of development.

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 241

NC/London: Duke Univ. Press

anthropology. Am. Ethnol. 18:16–40

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 243

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of International Development 245

zations. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 38:285–315

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