Erin Beck, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, has a new book out on How Development Projects Persist: Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs that might be of interest to many of you. Erin had a guest post on Countering Convergence: Agency and Diversity Among Guatemalan NGOs on this blog in June 2014.
In the book, Erin looks into the operations of two Guatemalan microfinance NGOS, Fundacion Namaste Guatemaya (Namaste) and Fraternidad de Presbiteriales Mayas (the Fraternity).
Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how development models and plans become entangled in the relationships among local actors in ways that alter what they are, how they are valued, and the conditions of their persistence. Beck focuses on two NGOs that use drastically different methods in working with poor rural women in Guatemala.
She highlights how each program’s beneficiaries—diverse groups of savvy women—exercise their agency by creatively appropriating, resisting, and reinterpreting the lessons of the NGOs to match their personal needs. Beck uses this dynamic—in which the goals of the developers and women do not often overlap—to theorize development projects as social interactions in which policymakers, workers, and beneficiaries critically shape what happens on the ground.
This book displaces the notion that development projects are top-down northern interventions into a passive global south by offering a provocative account of how local conditions, ongoing interactions, and even fundamental tensions inherent in development work allow such projects to persist, but in new and unexpected ways.
While reading the book, I wanted one of the NGO models to succeed. However, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Each organization had its own strengths and weaknesses. Success meant different things (greater income or leisure time, spiritual growth, companionship, meetings attended, people trained, profitability) to different people (donors, recipients, trainers, directors) at different periods in time.
At the end of the book, I walked away with thinking that there must be a better way. So much money is spent and so much time invested on these projects by really well-meaning people that you’d like to see more than isolated cases of success.
