1In May 2015, we had a meeting with the director of the Madagascar office of a bilateral development agency. Our interlocutor was an acknowledged specialist and expert in evaluation who had worked in multilateral organisations and published numerous reference works and scientific articles on the impact and effects of aid. After we had explained our research topic – the memory of development – he offered a frank reaction: “That’s a very sad topic you have there. You’re working on something that doesn’t exist. Yes, the memory of development? There’s no such thing!” In a sector in which aid professionals have an obligation to re-trace the path taken by programmes or projects so that they can report back to the lenders, this reaction came as a great surprise to us, and ran counter to our initial hypotheses. This method, which is shared by a number of experts in aid and development, has raised numerous questions around theoretical and empirical plans: does the coupling of memory and development make any sense? Is development supposed to leave traces, and if so, what traces, and with whom? How could this study be operationalised, and to what ends? These issues led us to put the concept of memory to the test in the development sphere by using it as a new means of studying development processes and development-related areas.
- 1 Follow-up evaluations are a device for steering development operations. They bring together the fol (...)
- 2 Interview with a GIZ mission leader in Rabat, 22 September 2015.
2The point of departure for this analysis of, and reflection on, the memory of development is a paradoxical form of asymmetry between the lasting memories “peasants retain of the succession of previous development operations in their area”, on the one hand, and the memory of development workers who behave as if they were arriving in a “virgin territory” on the other (Olivier de Sardan, 1995: 56). This is not a new observation, because as early as 1984, when follow-up evaluations1 were not a widespread practice in the aid world, Marc Dufumier and Dominique Gentil have written that “the tendency in a project is always to take the view that history begins with the project, to systematically underestimate everything that has been done previously and to overestimate the impact of the project” (Gentil and Dufumier, 1984; Lewis, 2009). The commencement of the activities associated with the intervention is therefore a point of departure in itself that starts from zero, and in which lenders and operators alike generally ignore the past. Taking account of temporalities and the past is therefore difficult, or even impossible, so much does the project idiom pervade the cognitive frameworks of aid professionals. In aid practices, it would appear that only things that can be improved are taken into consideration, and anything else is not part of the equation, and can be eliminated (Ferguson, 2005), as we can see from the words of a mission leader for the German International Cooperation Agency (GIZ) in Rabat: “We are under pressure to obtain results. We are practitioners, not researchers. We are asked to reach objectives, and looking at the past is not a part of the method”2. A particular development intervention is neither the first nor the last to impact a territory and its inhabitants: it is part of a continuum, and is implemented in a dynamic universe in which the actors learn from the succession of projects over the course of time. In fact, as with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, who uses the memory word, the work of Kate Crehan and Achim von Oppen (1988) shows that the milieu, whether physical or social, retains a trace of former interventions, and that there is a social history of this milieu that evolves in contact with the worlds of aid.
3Although various authors have used the concept of memory, including Jean-François Baré (1997), who stressed the fact that the memory of previous projects and programmes affects the outcome of interventions, there has been little research that has studied it specifically and in detail. We will cite two of them here by way of an introduction. In the first place, we have the work of Olivier Ruë, who used a geographical and physical approach to study the evolution of coastline development in Guinea, and what he defines as the “memories of mangrove” (Ruë, 1998). Although he, too, mentions the blindness and amnesia of development, his approach is limited to an analysis of the archives. The practices and representations of the people are only marginally present in his work. He therefore makes metaphorical use of the concept of memory, but does not use the analytical frameworks or theoretical references related to it, unlike Philippe Geslin – again with regard to Guinea – who questions “the local memory of development” around salt farming. He analyses the way in which producers “place the past in the service of the present” by mobilising the development of salt cultivation techniques that form a part of history and local practices (Geslin, 1998). In this way, he demonstrates that the “local memory of development” has merged with the system of social representations to the point where it influences social and technical behaviours. The avenues opened up by these works provide us with information on a fundamental component of the reflections developed in this issue: the memory of development is not the same as the history of aid.
4The aim of this thematic issue is also to reopen the topic of the lack of historical awareness in the developmentalist configuration, and to re-read it together with the concept of memory on the basis of a two-pronged investigation. First of all, what remains of the aid and development processes that make up projects and programmes? The contributions in this issue will touch on this question in various contexts for different actors in developmental configurations (aid professionals in the Souths and Norths, public actors, individuals who are more or less closely involved in these processes, etc.). The analyses presented here look not only at the narratives and materialities (landscape features) of development, but also at the public policies that carry the traces of development interventions within them. Secondly, how are these memories of development created and constructed socially and politically as a function of the land, the actors or the development experiences? This question will raise others that are explored by the contributions collected in this issue with regard to uses and mobilisations of the past in the daily lives of individuals.
5The intention of the introduction to this thematic issue is to mark out the topic of memory development and define its contours by using a reverse exercise as its point of departure: an exploration of what it is not. Our aim here is to avoid the “classic” methodological frameworks for analysing a sector that is frequently viewed from the standpoint of its usefulness, efficacy, or domination of the recipient social systems, and to drive an academic and professional reflection that seeks to reinterpret aid and development through a particular tool: memory.
6The notion of memory comes from the social sciences. It is a subject for researchers, but also a reality named as such by social actors (Lavabre, 2007). As Jennifer Cole reminds us in her work on the memory of the events in Madagascar in 1947, memory has three meanings, which she defines as a mental capacity to store elements and recover them; the emotional, semantic or sensitive content of this stored information; and finally the place where these memories are stored (Cole, 2001). These Western meanings attached to memory cover different realities and forms of the presence of the past. Their analysis is fragmented, and is at the crossroads between several areas of study, including history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, neurosciences and psychology.
7Memory has long been a subject of controversies in the area of the political mobilisation of history. The notion is also often defined in comparison to the past, because they are in opposition to each other. Bringing the two notions together would mean ignoring an essential feature of memory: that is, that it is a “representation constructed from the past, and not the past itself, which is obsolete by definition” (Fouéré, 2010). Memory is therefore a mental form of a representation of the past. This means that an analysis of memory at moment T makes it possible to characterise not only the social relations and social representations at the time the researcher questions the subject, but also collective representations of the past. Memory also relates to the future and the expectations of individuals, to the extent that perceptions of the past fashion their social, political and economic aspirations, as illustrated by the work of Robert Michael Ahearne (2014) on the life narratives of interventions in Tanzania. Memory therefore forms a liaison between the past and the future. This notion is developed in particular in the contribution to this issue by Marie-Aude Fouéré and Yonatan Gez, who use their experiences of development in Tanzania to analyse the tangible and intangible afterlives of development projects. They examine and demonstrate how vestiges of development projects lead to regret and nostalgia, hopes and disillusionment, and can constitute symbolic and practical resources for influencing local political and socioeconomic issues. Melina Kalfelis’s contribution also explores this dimension, analysing the “temporal struggles” around partnerships between international actors and the members of an association in Burkina Faso. In particular, she analyses the way in which the memories of workers in this association play a role in the present in their relations with their partners.
8History is not memory, and memory is not history. Some historians have clarified the distinction between the two notions of this conflicting pair. According to Pierre Nora (2004: XIX), “Memory is life. It is always borne by living groups, and as such, is in a permanent state of evolution, open to the dialectics of memory and amnesia and unaware of its subsequent deformations [...]. History is the always a problematic and incomplete reconstruction of what no longer exists”. Memory is multiple, plural and individualised. Unlike history, which has a universal vocation, it is not the subject of consensus. Memory retains what is usually an immaterial trace that leaves the event with the individual, whereas history, which is in search of truth, will turn it into a documented description. Memory is therefore constructed and reconstructed in a dialogue with the social environment in which the person who has the memory lives. As analysed by Maurice Halbwachs (1925), recollections are dependent on other people’s stories, as well as social rituals and social frameworks (events, commemorations, statutory groups, Church, family, etc.).
9There is therefore a difference in the nature of history and memory, which we will classify as epistemological. Bringing the two of them together means forgetting that memory is a mental constructive representation of the past that is always current, to the extent that it guides individual and collective actions and representations. Memory is therefore made up of recollections of past events that are recalled by means of a reconstruction mechanism. In this work on the memory of development, the interest has focused on these reconstructed recollections, which are so many traces left by the succession of development interventions. The contribution by Sambou Ndiaye, which analyses land projects in a municipality in Senegal, shows how narratives around projects are the fruit of reinterpretations and reconstructions that reveal the potential memory-related disputes among actors.
10In a work on the memory of development, the question of knowing what memories one is talking about comes up quite quickly. Are these the memories of individual recipients of aid interventions, or is it the memory of aid professionals? The contributions in this issue look at the different actors in a developmental configuration – beneficiaries as well as aid operators or professionals – sometimes intersecting these memories within a broader-based reflection, as Loïc Barbedette et Denis Pesche have done. The contribution by Jean-Philippe Berrou and Matthieu Brun explores the question of memory in actors who are considered to possess it. They develop a methodology and argument based around “custodians of the memory of development” in a comparative approach in Morocco and Madagascar. While there is no institutionalised history of the past of development at the level of countries under aid regime, certain individuals are acknowledged and reputed to carry or embody the memory of development interventions. Berrou and Brun analyse the reputational configurations around the supposed carriers of memory of development.
- 1 On this subject, see the work by Franck Fortuné and Pierre-Jean Roca presented at the conference on (...)
11We should clarify, however, that a history of development does exist, and has been the subject of a very large number of studies, publications and writings. There is also a written heritage-related or institutional history that uses archive materials and interviews to provide an account of the history of aid from multiple standpoints: that of a bilateral or multilateral lender, a local or national agency or a particular individual, etc. These monographs offer institutional histories on aid-related devices, and are written in the light of the “great” history of development: that is, the succession of paradigms of aid and its political economy. We would mention, for example, works on the World Bank (Devesh et al., 2010) or the French Development Agency (Pacquement, 2015). NGOs have also adopted similar approaches in order to capitalise on past experiences. In particular, we would note the works by the Luxembourg OMG Lëtzebuerger Jongbaueren a Jongwënzer on the introduction of donkey carts in Burkina Faso from 1959 (Lëtzebuerger Jongbaueren a Jongwënzer, 2004). The capitalisation of experiences is also an exercise in collecting data and evaluating their action, which is increasingly being used by actors in the development field1. In short, these histories of aid are very different from the history proposed by a study on the memory of development and the contributions collected in this issue.
12The memory of development has a heuristics significance, in the sense that it makes it possible to shift the focus of development interventions by looking at the effects produced and the traces left behind by the accumulation of projects and programmes in a particular territory. However, by using the field of memory, one calls upon an experience that is constantly evolving. Memory is therefore necessarily plural and inevitably subjective. These methods of revisiting development aid and processes could be used by aid professionals as a way to better understand the impact of projects and programmes over the long term, or even to inform the way in which new interventions could be hosted or implemented. But this means that aid professionals cannot view memory as a new form of objective accountability. In fact, for technical, practical and legal reasons, professionals seek causal links between an intervention and its effect or effects in order to evaluate the aid and arrive at a rational determination of its efficacy. They seek to impute actions to an operator or a project, which is made especially difficult in the context of work on memory, because memory is hard to objectify, and is linked above all to emotions and representations.
13What is more, if it is reconstructed, a memory of an individual is above all inaccessible, or rather it is only presented in the form of an account of experiences, as the evidence developed in the contribution by Loïc Barbedette and Denis Pesche in this issue on peasant memories clearly demonstrates. There is, in fact, a notable difference between the acts remembering – which is a priori an individual act and a cerebral event that is not necessarily verbalised – and evoking, because evocation relates to the narration and story of a recollection. When it is passed through forms of mediation such as language, this recollection loses its richness, and can also change, depending on the moment and circumstances of its evocation. In the opinion of Maurice Bloch, who was confronted with mismatches of memory in accounts of recollections of the insurrections against the colonial system in Madagascar in 1947, the linguistic product that forms the recollection, when delivered by an individual, is transformed in numerous ways, and its content becomes uncertain (Bloch, 1995). This means that the memory of development truly exists, but is imperfect, because it is collected by a researcher (or the person collecting the story) in the form of an account, and the conditions under which it is collected determine its content. In addition, it is not possible to take account of all development interventions over the course of time. The territories covered by the contributions in this issue have been the site of numerous interventions, the nature of which changes over the years. Reconstructing memories therefore involves gathering archives and documents that make it possible to obtain a more or less true idea of the interventions implemented in a particular place in order to more accurately discern the value of what has been forgotten or has passed in silence.
- 1 Including in longer-term programmes that include actions or projects to be implemented.
14The impossibility of taking all development interventions into consideration is connected with an even broader question regarding the relationship to temporalities and the very nature of the research topic: is the memory of development the sum of particular recollections of interventions? In other words, how can memories of development be reconstructed when the function of the development structure is based on a sequential approach and cycles of projects?1 In actual fact, a development project, accompanied by a series of tools such as the logical framework matrix, is the principal means whereby aid is implemented (Giovalucchi and Olivier de Sardan, 2009). A project is therefore the privileged tool used by the researcher and evaluator in order to analyse the development processes. It is, however, a temporary organisation that is then followed by other projects, which therefore participate in dividing the real into slices (corresponding to an equal number of projects or interventions). This is despite the fact that the purpose of the aid is to take a hold over the long term, and to take part in the process of fashioning development which, unlike a project, is elusive and hard to evaluate. A project therefore functions in the form of a dual trigger, and its implementation has its own short-term objectives, and is intended to serve as a lever for transformations on a broader scale and over the long term. This interlocking of temporalities (short-term objectives and long-term transformation) creates a considerable empirical problem when it comes to collecting the memory of development: how can experiences of a project, which are by their very nature sequential, be translated into memory? Our research in the field has also shown that the people we investigated used the project as a narrative element of their development experiences, and that it is an intermediary between the memory and the traces left behind by development processes. By analysing the memory of development beyond the project, a memory can be interpreted that is not based on a shared lived event at a precise date. On the contrary, with projects and multiple interventions, the events analysed are likely to be reproduced several times over the years. In this way, as Marie-Aude Fouéré points out, they mingle within the same space of memory “of stories of the past linked to different temporalities” (Fouéré, 2010: 5). The serial nature of interventions – that is, their implementation in successive waves over the course of time and the similarity in terms of the way they operate and their objectives (improving agricultural production or the fight against poverty and the precariousness of certain groups, etc.) – orientates, or even constrains, the process of reconstructing and expressing recollections. It can, in fact, lead to the creation of generic recollections formed on the basis of multiple experiences of participation in development projects. We should note, however, that certain works, such as that by Robert Ahearne (2014) on Tanzania, have liberated themselves from the project dimension, and have only looked into the development process from a global standpoint. Ahearne is not interested in the traces left by interventions, but rather in the popular representations of development among the older age group.
15Unlike the history of development, memory is plural and subjective, which potentially makes it hard to use or to put into operation in the development sphere. A rereading of past experiences of development processes, their implementation and their success or failure through the prism of individual and socially shared memories is a useful addition to the classic tools of evaluation used in professional aid environments. This is the major contribution of the article by Claire Simonneau in this issue, in which she explores the trajectory of an instrument of public action (an urban land registry) following its implementation as part of a development project. She analyses the transformations in public action by looking at what happened after the projects. Investigating the traces left by tools established by development projects is particularly complex from a methodological standpoint. As the contribution by Hamidou Diallo, Charlotte Guénard, Maria-Belén Ojeda Trujillo and Anne-Sophie Robilliard based on their research in a regional observatory in Senegal demonstrates, there is no systematic device for conserving information on development projects and the policies implemented on the ground.
16It is impossible to avoid taking the historical experience of populations into consideration in development practices. Aid professionals must be aware that memory is an important element in individuals’ reactions to proposed projects, and more generally in the position they adopt towards developmental configurations. Development operators therefore have an interest in analysing the strong points drawn from past experiences that are the foundation of the actions, reactions and perceptions relating to development interventions in the future. On this subject, the contribution by Philippe Lavigne Delville and Noël Gbaguidi draws attention to forgetfulness and the role of memory in certain public policy reforms. Using two attempts to formalise land rights in rural Benin, one just prior to Independence and the other more recent, as their point of departure, their analysis looks at the issue of memory and forgetfulness in (public) development policies. They reveal the links between these two moments in time, and discuss the way in which the memory of previous experiences is concealed, ignored or mobilised in moments of re-emergence. Their article also brings up the need to take account of the historicity of policies from a longer-term perspective. Their contribution crosses archival data with interviews, and like other contributions in this issue, it shows that an oral memory collected and reconstructed with the help of recollections is a complex horizon for aid professionals. It is even more complicated when these professionals are unable to go beyond the logic of accountability, which is – justifiably – a characteristic of the way they operate. A work on memory implies moving away from the logic of accountability, which is focused on the actions of one operator in particular, and is not intended to recreate the complex network of causes, consequences and impacts above and beyond the activities this operator performs. It is impossible to apply this accountability approach to the work of memory.
- 1 This is a term used by the French Development Agency on its website: In-depth the valuations “relat (...)
17Conversely, it is also necessary to question the impact of the fluctuation of recollections and the imperfect nature of memories in works of qualitative evaluation, in particular in a context in which “in-depth evaluations”1 are carried out on a series of projects, in a particular territory or over a longer period of time. However, these studies should be encouraged, to the extent that they make it possible to account for a continuum of knowledge and capital emerging from participation in, or more generally the implementation of, projects and programmes. Likewise, aid actors can, and must, begin this work, as demonstrated by the contribution in this issue by Loïc Barbedette and Denis Pesche, which analyses a space of construction and reconstruction of memories. The contribution by Marie Ferré, Genowefa Blundo Canto, Aurelle de Romémont, Berline Africa Maagoum Soh and Aurélie Binot also looks at the point of view of an institution, CIRAD, which participates in development in countries under an aid regime. It analyses the way in which the past can be examined in order to offer reflections on and encourage the implementation of new interventions.
18Having outlined what the memory of development is not, the contributions in this issue of Anthropologie & développement explore what it is, suggesting new sociological, historical and anthropological insights into development interventions and their tangible and intangible memory. With the help of empirical data and methodological discussions, the contributions examine a development “in the present” using past representations as a point of departure.
19The various contributions gathered together in this issue offer differing views of the memory of development. In proposing this topic without imposing limitations on the field of analysis, the aim was to open the way for a global reflection on the issues, paradoxes, methods and problems. It is not so much a case of freezing the subject of the memory of development as it is of finding ways of understanding it by looking at various disciplines, and by going beyond the conceptual debate we explored in this introduction between the well documented “history and memory” and the highly operational “accountability and memory”. Offering thoughts on the memory of development means posing classic questions about aid from a new angle, or at least issues that have hitherto been little explored. This issue is therefore an exercise in laying the groundwork, with the aim of opening avenues of research that will find a resonance in the debate on the aid sector. Although for reasons of procedure and accountability, impact studies and evaluations look for the imputability of a project or a programme in social change, the memory of development offers us the opportunity to move outside the temporal and socio-territorial space of the project. An analysis of memory also makes it possible to show other ways in which the distribution of the innovations and supposed changes brought about by one or more programmes can be meshed through the use of networks or capillary action.
20There is no doubt that it is too early to conclude with a discussion on the method expected by aid professionals, who are always greedy for innovative tools, with this hard-to-understand topic of memory. Naturally, however, it is at the heart of all the issues around participation, strengthening capacity and taking the words of beneficiaries into consideration. It forcefully brings back the lived and felt reality in an analysis, above and beyond the observed, measurable realities that permeate all the manuals on managing developing projects. It also gives this lived reality a temporal dimension by introducing evolving variables for understanding development, where using indicators as a form of measurement freezes the results. By exploring the tangible and intangible traces of development interventions and how they are evoked, it becomes possible to offer new perspectives on development aid by moving beyond two concepts: the temporalities of the project approach and the frameworks and tools used to evaluate aid.
21This is certainly not a conclusive issue on the memory of development, but rather an invitation to researchers and practitioners alike to take a new look at the dynamics of development.
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