AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	17. States at work: African public services in comparative perspective
Paper ID	573
Author(s)	Lie, Jon Harald Sande
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	The notion of the state and its designated role, and processes of development are highly intertwined. It would be insufficient to try to grasp the post-colonial African state without taking the influence of external development aid agencies into account. This paper deals with mechanisms of governance and state building within the development sector, and draws on anthropological fieldwork from both the World Bank in Washington DC and from the part of the state bureaucracy in Uganda designated with coordinating donor funded development initiatives. The contradiction between conditionality and participatory approaches comprises a seeming paradox, both being highly acknowledged ideas in the formal arrangement of international development architecture. The latest paradigmatic change of this architecture is the transition from donor-induced structural adjustment programmes to PRSP-documents, produced by the recipient government to facilitate participation and ownership as the guiding principle of development assistance on state level. State building and good governance are central to the PRSP-process, and manifests the state as the central actor in development. Moreover, this transition entails a seeming consignment of power from donor to recipient government in policymaking processes. However, as the PRSP needs World Bank/IMF approval to become effective this inclines the government to produce a document that reflects donors’ policies in order to release funding, which the government in the case of Uganda is highly dependent upon as external funding make up about half of the Ugandan national budget. This raises important issues regarding the role of donors in a country’s internal affairs regarding to whom which actor is accountable. Also, it shows the problem of empowerment and participation in opposition to the trusteeship of donors and their lack of will to give up control despite their rhetoric. This empirical setting serves as the frame for the analysis of the conditionality-participation nexus This nexus indicates an intention on the donor’s part of an indirect use of coercive power over the recipient, which is reminiscent of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. In aid chains – or donor–recipient relationships – the donor attempts to install concepts of ‘emancipation’ and ‘empowerment’ through participatory approaches with the aims of generating local ‘ownership’ to its imposed state building policy so that people can take control over their own development. This entails a process aimed at making the donor’s conditionality, policy and objectives those of the recipients, thus the arrangement of donor–recipient relationships comprises an indirect exercise of power. This calls forth power/knowledge formations as illuminated by Foucault in his concept of governmentality. Altering people’s mentalities is thus integral to development aid. Hence, I coin the term developmentality, akin to governmentality, which directs attention not only to the donor’s coercive power and its transferral of knowledge, but also to the policy objective of good governance itself. This paper seeks to describe and analyse this process in the context of donors’, and the World Bank in particular, efforts on Ugandan state building.

Developmentality, State Building and the Participation-Conditionality Nexus