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Representations of Aid Recipients Flawed
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- Representations Important to Aid Policies
- Gender Representations in Aid Policies Flawed
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Representations of Aid Recipients FlawedREPRESENATIONS OF AID RECIPIENTS AS PASSIVE OTHERS MASKS RESISTANCE STRATEGIES, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND NEOLIBERAL BLAMING Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 171-2 The image of the passive Other can be seen as masking partner resistance – the ways in which partners resist donor rules and development worker advice. It also serves to conceal the ways in which this resistance and the contradictions inherent in development feed a process in which attributing passivity to (and thereby blaming) the partner provides a means of protecting the development worker Self from feelings of failure. As argued in Chapter 1, the stereotype can be seen as a coping mechanism, as an expression of feelings of insecurity and failure and the efforts to deal with and protect oneself from these. The discourse of passivity not only hides resistance; it also masks economic inequalities and their manifestations in livelihood strategies. That is, it conceals the fact that many people working in partner organizations, in contrast to expatriate development workers, have to devote time and energy to survival, to searching for other income-generating activities outside formal work. As argued in Chapter 3, while most development workers are aware of economic inequalities and their manifestations, the discourse of passivity still shapes processes of identification. It also provides meaning to “development problems.” Hence, it can be argued that the livelihood strategies that reflect activity and innovation are rendered invisible or marginalized by a discourse in which Africans are either presented as prioritizing other things in life than money and work, or as spoilt by too much development aid. The imagery of the passive Other also masks the centrality of the idea of aid dependence in a neoliberal discourse where the blame for poverty tends to be located with the poor themselves. As Chapter 4 noted, one irony evident in the workings of the discourse of aid dependence is that people who tend to represent themselves as advocates of social welfare and dismiss the idea of aid dependence as part of neoliberal politics often accept aid dependence as unproblematic and self-explanatory truth when it comes to development aid and the African recipient. REPRESENTATION OF AID RECIPIENTS AS “UNRELIABLE” MASK STEREOTYPES Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 172 The image of the unreliable Other obfuscates the ways in which the power inequalities inherent in the aid relationship determine that partners cannot articulate e goals without putting the partnership at risk. Contrary to the message that urges partners to articulate their goals as if there were not stakes involved, there are indeed risks involved in articulating goals that differ from those of the donor. In this sense, complete openness is impossible if one is to become and remain a “partner.” Above all, however, the image of the unreliable Other (like the image of passivity) masks the workings of stereotyping. It hides the ways in which the stereotype of the unreliable Other is manifested in differential treatment that conceals the unreliability of certain people: the supposedly reliable Western Self. Representations Important to Aid PoliciesASSISTANCE POLICIES GROUNDED IN ASSUMPTIONS OF IDENTITIES OF DONORS AND RECIPIENTS Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 2 This book starts from the assumption that the issue of identity is important to understanding how development aid is planned and negotiated. The image of an open, trustworthy, organized and committed Danish development worker Self in opposition to an implicit (and, later in the interview, explicit) image of the Tanzanian partner as unreliable, uncommitted and disorganized, as articulated in the extract above cannot be understood simply as insignificant words describing the Self and the Other. These meanings are manifested in development practice. Moreover, even if the constitution of identities in the development context can in no way be separated from the economic inequalities inherent in the aid relationship, the meaning and workings of identity have their own dynamics and cannot be read merely as a reflection of unequal economic relations. In this perspective, identity is a significant question that needs to be addressed and analyzed in order to understand practices of development aid.
Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 9 Instead of reading partnership discourses in terms of a mere continuance, as only displaying a conspiracy or tactic, partnership is read in this book as harboring different conflicts and tensions. As I show in the coming chapters, there is a contradiction between the message of partnership and donor images of Self and partners –which portray a superior, active and reliable Self in contrast to an inferior, passive, unreliable partner. These identities, which are not firmly established but also questioned, should not be perceived as being outside the partnership discourse. They are inscribed within the partnership discourse itself, which cannot be understood either in terms of a total break or of continuance. The contradictions inherent in the partnership discourse can instead be seen as reflecting the ways in which “decolonized situations are marked by the imperial pasts they try to disavow,” or of reflecting “the state of undecideability” of the postcolonial condition (Gikandi 1996: 15).
Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 117-8 The weak in society are not only the poor, but also women. As several feminist scholars have shown, the Third World woman (and before that, the colonized woman) has functioned as the oppressed, backward Other in relation to which a certain image of a liberated, developed, educated female Western Self has been constituted. This image of the Third World woman has also informed the development industry. As Jane Parpart (1995a: 227) puts it while discussing the development aid practice of the 1950s and 1960s: “Drawing on a long history of colonial discourse which represented Third World women as particularly backward and primitive, development planners continued and even extended the representation of Third World women as the primitive ‘other,’ mired in tradition and opposed to modernity.” This imagery continued to be reproduced in the Women in Development (WID) discourse of the 1970s. As Parpart contends WID reinforced rather than challenged the image of the backward and oppressed Third World Woman. Moreover, while the Gender and Development approach of the 1990s entailed radical changes in thinking about gender and development, it did not entail many changes in the image of Third World women as the “impoverished, vulnerable other, who ‘need to be saved from poverty and backwardness’” (1995a: 236). This dominant discourse also informs articulations of a gendered Self in the context studied here. As was observed in the previous chapter, the question of gender was – notwithstanding the emphasis on gender within development aid in recent years – noticeably absent in the interviews. In general, gender was not invoked in representations of Self or of the Tanzanian Other. However, when the issue of gender was introduced by me, most women articulated a particular Western or European female identity constituted in opposition to Tanzanian women. Tanzanian women were often presented as bound by tradition, powerless, family-oriented, quite and oppressed, an image which is constructed in relation to an often implicit, but also sometimes explicit, image of the Self as a modern, liberated Danish, British or Western woman, capable of handling things herself. TARGETING AID PROGRAMS TO EXCLUDED GROUPS MARGINALIZES THEM Edward Ramsamy, Africana Studies Professor-Rutgers, 2006, The World Bank and Urban Development, p. 13 In Escobar’s view, development policy may have resulted in “forty years of incredibly irresponsible policies and programs,” but the World Bank “will not be driven out o f business by repeated failure.” Drawing on Foucault’s observation that failure does not necessarily undermine social institutions, Escobar argues that development discourse incorporates new ideas and social movements, so that previously neglected groups and issues such as peasants, women, and the environment may be incorporated even as they are being marginalized.
Edward Ramsamy, Africana Studies Professor-Rutgers, 2006, The World Bank and Urban Development, p. 15 Researchers, like Escobar, who apply the postmodern method to development studies seek to discover institutions, social processes, and economic relations on which the discursive formation of development is articulated. For them, discourses are power plays which assert a particular understanding through the construction of knowledge. “Because they [discourses] organize reality in specific ways that involve particular epistemological claims, they provide legitimacy, and indeed provide the intellectual conditions for the possibility of particular institutional and political arrangements.” (Dalby 1988: 416) In doing so, discourses make these socially constructed arrangements appear natural, so as to “foreclose political possibilities and eliminate from consideration a multiplicity of words” (Dalby 1990: 4). Representations HarmfulWESTERN REPRESENTATION OF AID RECIPIENTS ENABLES DOMINATION Rita Abrahamsen, (lecturer on African and Postcolonial Politics at the University of Wales, PhD. In Development) 2000 Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa Pg.21b- 22a Over the years development discourse has achieved the stats of ‘truth’, effectively shaping and restricting the ways in which developing countries can be spoken about and acted upon. It is by now extremely difficult to speak or thinking about the third world in any other terms, as the worlds of development are the only ones available to us to describe these countries. Conditioned to look for the third world and underdevelopment, the images and hierarchies of development discourse are constantly reproduced and reaffirmed in the North’s representations of the South. We see this almost on a daily basis in the media, where pictures of starving children and toiling peasants overshadow any alternative representation of Southern countries. So strong is this hegemony of development discourse that, as Escobar (1995: 5) points out, even those who are opposed to development as conventionally defined remained until recently trapped within its language and imagery. Unable to escape the terms of the hegemonic discourse, critiques often identified alternative forms of development, such as non capitalist development or participatory development, and thus reproduced aspects of the discourse they sought to reject. The power of development discourse to define the social world and create a ‘regime of truth’ is also evidence in that the governments and peoples of underdeveloped countries have on occasions and in certain contexts come to see themselves in these terms. On the one hand, these identities my at time have given underdeveloped countries a degree of leverage vis à vis developed countries, in that they provided the tools to argue for more assistance, more development experts, more rural extensions schemes, and so on. The Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement can be seen as examples of such collective demands by the third world vis à vis the North. On the other hand, the identities of development have instilled a degree of interiority a longing to escape the underdevelopment state of affairs, a hierarchy where underdeveloped countries and peoples are the perpetual losers, to be endlessly reformed, reshaped and improved. This is not to suggest that the production of subjectivities and identities by hegemonic discourses such as development is unmediated by or passively accepted by people in the South. Development, for all its power to control the manner in which the third world is spoken about and acted upon, is not immune to challenges and resistance. The objects of development are not passive receivers, wholly oppressed by power; they are active agents who may and frequently do contest, resist, diver and manipulate the activities carried out in the name of development. In this way, development can be seen as a contested field. Its constitution of subjects as underdeveloped, poor and illiterate enables the continuation of Western domination in the world, while simultaneously opening up new avenues and strategies of resistance. DISCOURSE LEGIMITIZES HEGEMONIC DOMINANCE Rita Abrahamsen, (lecturer on African and Postcolonial Politics at the University of Wales, PhD. In Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa Pg.22c- 23a This is not to say that development is either necessarily wrong or ill-intended, nor that developing countries themselves do not have the capacity to influence and change their own destiny and historicity. Instead it draws attention to the constructed identities of the subjects engaged in the activity of development, and the way in which subjects so constructed have their agency constrained by their position within the discourse. In the process of promoting development, the relevance of categories such as the third world as ways of understanding the social world is reinforced, and at the same time alternative representations become every more marginalized. The power relationship between these categories is also reconfirmed through its constant employment, and herein lies the link between presentational practices and international politics. Discourse legitimizes and justifies particular forms of actions and interventions, and the first world has reserved for itself the right to categorize the third world and to devise new strategies for the eradication of its underdevelopment. Directory: assets assets -> Northern territory of australia assets -> Number: caveat in the [Will/Will and Codicil/Estate of] assets -> Invitation for Bid Calact/mbta for Standard Floor and Low Floor Rural Duty Vehicles ifb no. 12-03 November 14, 2012 assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> Sigaccess annual Report assets -> Central Government is expected to ask the seventh pay commission to consider merging 50% dearness allowance assets -> List of accessible executive records assets -> Emergency telephone numbers Call toll-free from anywhere in France Download 2.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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