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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Multiple external interventions and the destruction of African Agrarian societies.
| Panel |
81. Contradictions along the path to development: International co-operation, elites and entrepreneurs
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| Paper ID | 367 |
| Author(s) |
Schiefer, Ulrich
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In many African societies, different types of external intervention are taking place simultaneously: development cooperation, humanitarian aid, rehabilitation and reconstruction, security intervention, etc. In multiple intervention scenarios, actors from different ‘intervention complexes’, constituted by different ensembles of agencies, from different origins, with different interests, values, missions and operational methodologies, bound by internationally standardized intervention formats, try to implement their usually short termed and often conflicting objectives, usually within their own paradigmatic and methodological constraints (policy-programme-project format). The low-trust-societies at the receiving end of these interventions are often characterized by traumatic experiences, disintegration of social structures and administrative institutions, and lack the coordination capacity to handle this kind of ‘external assistance’. Neither ‘donor coordination’, nor the ‘Sector Wide Approach’, nor ‘Direct Budget Support’ have been able to solve these problems. Chaotic organisational landscapes go hand in hand with a growing complexity of project partnerships which do not increase the coordination of intervention on the ground.
The cumulative effects of all these intervention are rarely evaluated, as the evaluation approaches, the main feedback mechanism of “intervention complexes” are geared to gauge the impacts of specific interventions only.
Cumulative impacts of different interventions are the extroversion of national elites which share the agencies appropriation model, the stifling of entrepreneurial initiatives, the concentration on the secondary dissipative economy, demographic concentrations close to the main distribution points of influxes, and, most important, the destruction of the only structures with a productive organization, the agrarian societies. These loose their manpower through migration, their most dynamic elements through cooptation into the dissipative economy, their capacity to transfer their social and productive knowledge to the younger generations and a growing part of their natural resources through overexploitation and appropriation by the urban elites. The fight for control over the influxes destabilizes the political systems as factions of the power elite fight for control over the fluxes in ever more violent ways. In combination with the loss of control over the cadets’ potential for violence this leads to an increase of violent behaviour, and even to civil strife and war.
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