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Development Agents (development + agent)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production: Nature-based Conflicts in R7iacute;o San Juan, Nicaragua

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2000
Anja Nygren
This article focuses on local processes and global forces in the struggle over the fate of forests and over the contested claims of protection and production in a protected area buffer zone of Río San Juan, Nicaragua. The struggle over control of local natural resources is seen as a multifaceted process of development and power involving diverse social actors, from agrarian politicians and development agents to a heterogeneous group of local settlers, absentee cattle raisers, timber dealers, transnational corporations, and non-governmental organizations. The initial interest is in the local resource-related discourses and actions; the analysis then broadens to include the larger political-economic processes and environment-development discourses that affect the local systems of production and systems of signification. The article underlines environmental resource conflicts as one of the major challenges in subjecting structures of social power to critical analysis. [source]

"But the winds will turn against you": An analysis of wealth forms and the discursive space of development in northeast Brazil

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 1 2009
AARON ANSELL
ABSTRACT In this article, I explain the unfolding of a participatory development project in northeast Brazil by exploring how local genres of public speech articulate with categories of wealth. Although development resources cannot be easily categorized into local classes of wealth, they nonetheless evoke some of the anxieties cultivators feel when dealing with wealth forms susceptible to the evil eye. Beliefs surrounding the evil eye shape cultivators' relations to material objects, and they also define the contours of safe and acceptable speech within the village development association. As a result, during association meetings, the villagers speak in ways that frustrate development agents seeking to generate "open" and "transparent" managerial discourse felicitous to project success,at least, external notions of project success. Appreciating the link between wealth and speech forms sheds light on both the local implementation challenges that participants in such projects face and the reason development agents frequently blame ostensive project failures on beneficiary backwardness. [wealth, Brazil, development, evil eye, peasant society] [source]

Migrants as transnational development agents: an inquiry into the newest round of the migration,development nexus

POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE (PREVIOUSLY:-INT JOURNAL OF POPULATION GEOGRAPHY), Issue 1 2008
Thomas Faist
Abstract Migrant networks and organisations have emerged as development agents. They interact with state institutions in flows of financial remittances, knowledge, and political ideas. In the discursive dimension, the new enthusiasm on the part of OECD states and international organisations, such as the World Bank, for migrant remittances, migrant associations and their role in development, is a sign of two trends which have coincided. Firstly, community as a principle of development has come to supplement principles of social order such as the market and the state. Secondly, in the current round of the migration,development nexus, migrants in general and transnational collective actors in particular have been constituted by states and international organisations as a significant agent. In the institutional dimension, agents such as hometown associations, networks of businesspersons, epistemic networks and political diasporas have emerged as collective actors. These formations are not unitary actors, and they are frequently in conflict with states and communities of origin. The analysis concludes with reflections of how national states structure the transnational spaces in which non-state actors are engaged in cross-border flows, leading towards a tight linkage between migration control, immigrant incorporation and development cooperation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Hunters, ritual, and freedom: dozo sacrifice as a technology of the self in the Benkadi movement of Côte d'Ivoire

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2009
Joseph Hellweg
This article argues that dozo hunters in Côte d'Ivoire used sacrifice to become unofficial police in the 1990s as part of a security movement they called Benkadi. Scholars have noted similar transformations of West African hunters into soldiers, park guards, and development agents in the context of political, economic, and ecological changes. Although such changes created the conditions in which dozos assumed national security roles, these conditions alone fail to explain why dozos became police. I explore dozo sacrifice as a ,technology of the self' in Foucault's terms to argue that dozos freely assumed security roles as ethical responsibilities analogous to those implicit in their hunting and occult pursuits. I draw on Frankl and Laidlaw to explain the emotional and practical aspects of such self-fashioning. The cultural analysis of dozo rituals clarifies the ways dozo agency shaped the impact of political economy and ecology on dozo practice. Résumé L'article affirme que dans les années 1990, les chasseurs dozo de Côte-d'Ivoire ont utilisé le sacrifice pour se constituer en police officieuse au sein d'un groupement de sécurité qu'ils ont appeléBenkadi. Les chercheurs ont noté une évolution similaire par laquelle d'autres chasseurs d'Afrique de l'Ouest devenaient soldats, garde-chasse ou agents de développement, dans le contexte des changements politiques, économiques et écologiques. Bien que ces changements aient créé les conditions dans lesquelles les dozos se sont chargés de fonctions de sûreté nationale, ces conditions ne suffisent pas à expliquer comment ils en sont venus à constituer une force de l'ordre. L'auteur explore le sacrifice des dozos comme une «technologie de soi», selon les termes de Foucault, pour avancer qu'ils ont librement endossé des rôles de sûreté impliquant des responsabilités éthiques proches de celles implicitement contenues dans leurs chasses et leurs pratiques occultes. Il invoque Frankl et Laidlaw pour expliquer les aspects émotionnels et pratiques de cet auto-façonnage. L'analyse culturelle des rituels des dozoséclaircit la manière dont ils ont agi pour donner forme aux effets de l'économie et de l'écologie politiques sur leurs pratiques. [source]