First “meeting” with APAD

It was a great surprise and pleasure to discover APAD at the conference in 2013. What struck me then and still strikes me now is that there really is no equivalent space in North America: one in which anthropology is put to work in the empirical study of development, young scholars are enabled and encouraged, and there are vibrant collaborations that cross North/South boundaries. The mailings I receive from APAD are a treasure trove of news, announcements and invitations, many of which I forward to students and colleagues in other parts of the globe. I also appreciate APAD’s commitment to engagement with policy makers and development practitioners. This is rare in North America where there is less respect for academic research in general, and little sense that anthropology has important insights to offer. If development agencies turn to academia at all, it is more likely to be to the disciplines of economics or political science. APAD and its affiliated groups have carved out an important space for anthropology in the field of development policy and practice which has been sustained over several decades. I applaud this achievement and I’am very happy to be included in the fold. I am also grateful for the work APAD has done to make my work available to Francophone readers, notably through the translation of The Will to Improve, published by Karthala and APAD under the title Agir pour les autres (2020).

An anthropology of development projects and interventions

I agree that the approach to development I set out in The Will to Improve (2007) and some other articles is rather different from the one adopted by APAD. My analysis is not devoid of actors, but their everyday interactions do not take center stage. I think the difference lies in the scope and scale of the kinds of practices we study. An actor centered approach examines the practices that take place in offices and board rooms, village meetings and farms, market places and transport hubs. There are certainly important. But I am also interested in the constitution of the fields in which such actors operate – the conditions of possibility for any sort of “development intervention” to be imagined, and the practices through which a particular intervention is bounded and made to cohere. So, the common ground is the focus on practices – we are all interested in what actors do – but the difference lies in the kinds of practice that are the focus of investigation.

The question of development intermediaries

Since I wrote The Will to Improve I have thought more about the position of brokers and of strategic action, although it is has taken me in a different direction from the one developed by APAD. The shift for me came as I read more deeply into the character of the Indonesian state and came to recognize the role that “projects” play in the flow of funds towards officials, politicians, and brokers of diverse kinds (Li, 2016). The research I relied on was conducted by anthropologists and political scientists who have delved deeply into the heart of the state apparatus, in departments of forestry, public works, policing, judiciary, education, health and so on. Projects have several attractive characteristics: they come with a budget, a limited set of goals, and a fixed end point; and when time and money are finished, they discretely fizzle out. Often, no one looks too closely at whether the goals were actually achieved. This makes projects an ideal vehicle to disperse state and/or donor funds to patrons, clients and collaborators, and also to NGOs which depend on a flow of project funds. From this perspective, the most strategic outcome from a project is to generate another project. I do not think it is useful to characterize this as corruption, nor to focus on the strategic conduct of individual actors: development is a “project system” and to appreciate the implications of this, it is necessary to step back from its everyday functioning to ask how such a system came to be, and how it is sustained. There are some particular historical reasons why the “project system” became so deeply entrenched in Indonesia but I think the concept of a “project system” has some traction in many contexts.

About strategies for bypassing the target populations of development projects

I certainly agree that people who are the targets of development schemes react and manoever to protect their own interests, and they may achieve some successes. Ironically, the hierarchy of trusteeship makes it difficult for trustees to recognize the critical charge that may be embedded in manoevers of this kind. Deployments of the “weapons of the weak” are taken to confirm that villagers are indeed backward people, and trustees redouble their efforts to improve the conduct of their wards. Practices of government and practices of politics, I suggest, are two sides of the same coin: one provokes the other in a relation of perpetual reversal. Yet the terms of the dyad are not static. Critique always carries with it the potential to disrupt relations of power, and to make the world differently. Hence I am very interested in investigating the conjunctures at which the defensive reactions and skillful manoevers James Scott describes cross the threshold into an effective practice of politics; equally, I am interested in exploring how the emergence of a critical politics becomes stalled or interrupted, leaving systems of power unchallenged, and unchanged (Li, 2019).

Debates on ethics and the positions of researchers studying development

I believe both approaches can make a contribution. David Mosse’s position as a development insider gave him the opportunity to observe everyday practices and encounters, and he became very aware of internal contradictions. But insider-turned-researcher is a tricky position to occupy. When David Mosse stepped away from his insider job to write about the knowledge he gained, his former colleagues felt betrayed; if he had stayed “inside” he would not and perhaps could not have produced such an incisive analysis (Mosse, 2006). Some distance is necessary in order to write, but how much? In The Will to Improve I stood further back from the development apparatus in order to examine how such an apparatus comes to be, and how it works. I do not think I could have done this from inside because as an insider I would be committed to protecting the apparatus or perhaps improving it.

About development as a “will to improve” the conditions of existence of others

Your point that many people in the global South (and North) want to improve their conditions of life is well taken. I am not in the least romantic about poverty, nor about states that abandon their people and fail to provide the facilities for them to lead a decent life. My book Land’s End (2014b) investigates the path taken by indigenous highland farmers in Indonesia as they attempted to improve their access to food, housing and education for their children. The initiatives they took to achieve their goals had mixed results: they dived into production of cacao, a global market crop which brought prosperity to some and destitution to others. The key point is that they did not favour stasis, nor did they prioritize autonomy from the state or the market: they wanted to attract state services (a road, a school, health care) to their highland hamlets and they needed sufficient income so that they could live what they considered to be “normal” village lives.

The sad fact is that too many planned development interventions do not in fact provide people with access to improved livelihoods or essential services. They fail completely due to ineptness or irrelevance; they entrench a hierarchy between trustees and their wards; and often they make peoples’ lives more difficult. I gave some examples of this in The Will to Improve where efforts at “integrated conservation and development” yielded evictions, loss of income, and wasted funds. I am currently examining an extreme example of this problem in a study of Indonesia’s contemporary oil palm zone. The government grants massive land concessions to plantation corporations on the grounds that corporations bring development and prosperity to remote regions. Instead, ethnographic research I have conducted together with my co-author Pujo Semedi (2021) shows that corporations bring few benefits (unevenly distributed) and multiple harms, yet the aura of the promised development is sufficient to absolve them from responsibility for what they have done or failed to do.

So I do not take a position against the improvement of livelihoods and access to services; nor do I argue that people should stay as they are, especially when they have concluded for themselves that changes are needed and take steps to bring about improvement on their own terms. Rather I am against the hierarchy of trusteeship which sustains the racialized residues of colonial rule; I am against forms of maldevelopment that fail to bring benefits and/or bring harm, and I try to understand why maldevelopment is so very common. The practice of “rendering technical” that occludes history and excludes political-economic elements from the arena of intervention lies at the core of maldevelopment. I argue that the hierarchy of trusteeship and practice of rendering technical are not incidental to the practice of development but integral to it, hence the problem is too big to be solved by tinkering with the development apparatus: a fundamental reset is needed.