Cultivating Development is an innovative contribution to the ethnography of development.. Mosse’s argument is thought-provoking and serves to provide a helpful bridge between both the popular expectation of development organizations to be comprised of charitable, purely altruistic workers and the critical, post-modern narrative of the wholly politically-driven aid monolith (most influentially driven by the works of Ferguson and Escobar). While Mosse illuminates a portion of development work previously unstudied in totality (the aid project), his main arguments are under-supported, seek to frame the development organization as a somehow different operation than any other sort of organization, and ignore the interests of workers at different
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Coming out of a period of increased scrutiny on development organizations and a string of critics deriding the top-down approach of Western development organizations, the project sought to include the perspectives beneficiaries. At the outset an experimental project, the design team aimed to pilot a new model of development project hinged on the participatory approach, involving community-wide meetings, special attention to marginalized residents (women and the poor), and mediation between villagers and government officials. Mosse’s main argument is that development practice is not driven by policy, but rather supports it. He expands on this statement through five propositions about the nature of the relationship between policy and practice in development …show more content…
Chapters 6 & 7 deal with the production of success within and outside of development projects, depending on the prevailing interests and narratives of the development organization and irrespective of ‘real’ results on the ground. Mosse seems to lament that consultant expertise (such as his own) was used to “stabilize frameworks of interpretation” and “generalize models” outward rather than generating practices and exacting operational control (18). The position of the consultant was such that they were consistently speaking upward, to the donor, rather than downward to project staff and beneficiaries (134). Halfway through the project, ODA official policy shifted causing many of the project staff and consultants to scramble to revise project documents and official statements to reflect the shift in policy (176). Rather than scrutinizing and shaping project practice, the “ODA’s interest was in the project as a coherent rationalizing policy idea,” something that they could package, model, and export according to the prevailing interest; thus, to maintain the representation of success which the project had previously garnered great support of, ODA asked the project merely to modify its theory in order to jive with the newest thinking
Coming out of a period of increased scrutiny on development organizations and a string of critics deriding the top-down approach of Western development organizations, the project sought to include the perspectives beneficiaries. At the outset an experimental project, the design team aimed to pilot a new model of development project hinged on the participatory approach, involving community-wide meetings, special attention to marginalized residents (women and the poor), and mediation between villagers and government officials. Mosse’s main argument is that development practice is not driven by policy, but rather supports it. He expands on this statement through five propositions about the nature of the relationship between policy and practice in development …show more content…
Chapters 6 & 7 deal with the production of success within and outside of development projects, depending on the prevailing interests and narratives of the development organization and irrespective of ‘real’ results on the ground. Mosse seems to lament that consultant expertise (such as his own) was used to “stabilize frameworks of interpretation” and “generalize models” outward rather than generating practices and exacting operational control (18). The position of the consultant was such that they were consistently speaking upward, to the donor, rather than downward to project staff and beneficiaries (134). Halfway through the project, ODA official policy shifted causing many of the project staff and consultants to scramble to revise project documents and official statements to reflect the shift in policy (176). Rather than scrutinizing and shaping project practice, the “ODA’s interest was in the project as a coherent rationalizing policy idea,” something that they could package, model, and export according to the prevailing interest; thus, to maintain the representation of success which the project had previously garnered great support of, ODA asked the project merely to modify its theory in order to jive with the newest thinking