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Paired Opposites : Dualism in Development and Anthropology

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Paired OppositesDualism in Development and Anthropology

Thomas YarrowUniversity of Manchester, UK

Abstract ■ Over the past two decades, anthropological studies have highlightedthe ways in which overtly progressive ideas of ‘development’ have been used,paradoxically, to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty on a global scale.Such critiques have fed into a wider ‘postmodern challenge’ which has impor-tantly questioned previously held assumptions about development. However, thisprevailing critical approach has led to a number of problems. In particular thedeconstruction of development discourse has unwittingly re-inscribed many ofthe binary oppositions it seeks to overcome, without appreciating the complexways in which development workers employ these. Moreover, a critical impulseto uncover what development practice ‘hides’ focuses attention away from theideas and practices that development practitioners actively privilege. In thisarticle I argue that it is necessary to go beyond a critical, deconstructive approachin order to appreciate the socially and discursively complex ways in whichdevelopment workers employ such oppositions. Through an ethnographicaccount focusing on how oppositions between ‘local’ and ‘global’ and ‘policy’and ‘practice’ are used to frame a variety of development interventions inGhana, I outline the mobile ways in which such oppositions are deployed andhighlight the diverse ideas and agendas that they are used to articulate.Keywords ■ development ■ dualism ■ Ghana ■ knowledge ■ NGOs ■ policy

Introduction: beyond deconstruction

As with other forms of ‘auto-ethnography’ (Strathern, 1987), in which thesubject and object of analysis overlap, the anthropological study of develop-ment practice presents an interpretive problem. In contrast to conventionalethnographic inquiry, where the manifest otherness of ‘exotic’ societiesand cultures was imagined to create the need for anthropological trans-lation, development organizations operate through ideas and practices thatare in many respects co-extensive with those that underpin anthropologi-cal analysis. While anthropologists increasingly find employment indevelopment organizations and seek to exploit anthropological theoriesand methods in these contexts (Gardner and Lewis, 1996), developmentworkers are often trained in social scientific theory and use this as a way ofunderstanding and acting upon various groups of people. As Cooper andPackard insightfully observe: ‘anthropology . . . has been sceptical of the

Article

Vol 28(4) 426–445 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X08098260]Copyright 2008 © SAGE Publications (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com



idea of development and deeply caught up in it’ (1997: 15), both in termsof its practical engagements and its assumptions about social life. Yet evenwhere anthropologists and development workers ideologically or substan-tively disagree, this difference often becomes apparent through commondiscursive and epistemological forms. During research among NGOs anddevelopment organizations in Ghana I frequently confronted anthropo-logically familiar modes of documentation and analysis (Riles, 2006) and,indeed, anthropologically authored texts. More generally, developmentinterventions were framed in terms of discursive oppositions such as thosebetween policy and practice and local and global, which, as I argue below,have also been central to social scientific analysis. Henkel and Stirratsuggest that this predicament poses a problem for anthropology, arguingthat a ‘missing differential’ (2001: 169) has been the key obstacle to greaterunderstanding of the processes and practices through which developmentoperates.

In line with anthropological accounts of development more generally(e.g. Crewe and Harrison, 1998; Fairhead and Leach, 1997; Hobart, 1993;Mosse, 2001), Henkel and Stirrat seek to reinstate this ‘differential’ by afocus on what development discourses conceal. In this vein attention isdrawn to the ‘subterranean bases’ (Henkel and Stirrat, 2001) of develop-ment, the hidden assumptions and etymological roots. In a related wayother anthropological accounts have focused on the concealed social andpolitical agendas that animate development interventions (e.g. Escobar,1995; Ferguson, 1994). While these approaches challenge previously taken-for-granted assumptions, and highlight the often problematic outcomes ofdevelopment interventions, the trope of ‘concealment’ leads to a positionin which attention is focused beyond actors’ own understandings. By substi-tuting the ‘false objects’ of development with an ostensibly more ‘real’ setof social and political functions, anthropological accounts have obscuredimportant aspects of the processes through which development projects areenacted (cf. Mosse, 2005). Green (2003) notes that this leads to an alien-ated view of development in which institutional practice is reified andhuman agency is given a correspondingly limited role (cf. Friendman,2006). More importantly in terms of the present analysis, in searching for‘difference’, anthropologists have often overlooked the role of institutionaland discursive forms of knowledge that are ‘too well known to be described’(Riles, 2001: 20). The dualisms on which this article focuses have eludedethnographic description precisely because of their overt familiarity.

As in other areas of anthropological inquiry, the deconstruction ofdevelopment has highlighted the problematic role of a number of relatedoppositions, pointing to the ways in which these flatten the complexities ofthe situations in which development interventions take place.1 In this veinGardner and Lewis argue that: ‘anthropological insights can provide adynamic critique of development and help push thought and practice away from oversimplistic models and dualities . . . and in more creative

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directions’ (1996: 2). Yet, as Crewe and Harrison (1998) note in theirethnography of development projects in Africa and India, such oppositionsare also central to a variety of academic accounts:

The contrast between success and failure in development is often oversimpli-fied. It is one of a number of paired opposites upon which both observers andpractitioners rely to explain a complex world. In the critical literature anddevelopment policy documents, simple dichotomies oppose, for example,developers and developing, donors and beneficiaries, rich and poor, rural andurban, Third World and First World, indigenous and Western. (1998: 4,emphasis added)

Building on this insight, I would argue that recent academic analysis ofdevelopment, including much of the anthropological literature, re-inscribes many of the categories it has set out to deconstruct. For example,Hobart’s (1993) critical analysis assumes development to be a ‘Western’ setof ideas and practices and opposes this to the ‘indigenous’ beliefs ofbeneficiary communities. Escobar (1995) highlights the hegemonic role of ‘global’ development discourses but in doing so invokes the ‘local’understandings of various others. Similarly, recent anthropologicalcritiques have deconstructed the abstractions of ‘policy’ with recourse tothe category of ‘practice’ (Apthorpe, 1997; Shore and Wright, 1997).Despite important epistemological differences between anthropology anddevelopment, both therefore employ similar oppositional logics in attempt-ing to resolve (albeit with distinct interests and often to very different ends)a tension between the quest for generalizable knowledge and the specificityof particular situations and ideas.

Crewe and Harrison (1998) argue that such oppositions conceal thecomplex workings of social relations and regard this as cause for theiranalytic abandonment in anthropology and in studies of developmentmore generally. In the light of their own research, they suggest that ‘such polarities may be misplaced – social reality is far more complicated’(1998: 4). This leads to a critique of anthropologists as well as to a familiarcriticism of development workers themselves.

My own analysis builds on the insight that similar oppositions frameboth development practice and academic accounts of this. However, Isuggest that, as with the deconstruction of other kinds of reification, theexposure of these discursive forms as mere artifice fails to illuminate therole that these oppositions perform and the meanings and uses that theyacquire in different ethnographic contexts. Since these oppositions arecentral to the way in which a variety of development workers and benefici-aries imagine their similarities to and differences from one another, theycannot be straightforwardly opposed to ‘social reality’ (Pigg, 1997; Yarrow,in press) in the manner that others have suggested.

By contrast I aim to show that rendering these oppositions as ethno-graphic objects in their own right enables an appreciation of the ways inwhich these frame social interactions whose cultural and discursive

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complexity is not reducible to the terms themselves. Law (1994) incisivelyargues, in the context of scientific practice, that dualisms are notimmutable givens within the world, but achievements brought aboutthrough forms of ordering that entail particular social practices. As such hesuggests that dualism should be treated as a social project and hence asociological topic. Here I extend this perspective to argue that, in thecontext of development, the analytic questioning of oppositions should notlead to their outright rejection. Rather than simply deconstruct or critiquedualisms, attention should focus on their discursive possibilities andpractical effects within the world, whether positive or negative.

From this perspective the salient question becomes how and why theseoppositions are employed, by whom and to what effect? If oppositionssimplify, then how might these simplifications be regarded as valuable oruseful (cf. Lea, 2002; Riles, 2001)? Rather than assume that these conceal‘social reality’, the question of what they hide or reveal has to be asked inrelation to particular groups of people in specific moments.

In place of the prevailing approach that pits anthropological theoryagainst an ethnographic understanding of development organizations, Itreat these as a single, though by no means unified, field of inquiry. This isnot to suggest that anthropology and development are coterminous, butonly that overlapping modes of discursive ordering have been central toboth. Focusing on the social practices through which oppositions arecreated and understood thus entails turning aspects of anthropology’sanalytic vocabulary ‘inside out’ (Riles, 2001).

In the following account I examine the related oppositions between‘policy’ and ‘practice’ and ‘local’ and ‘global’, as they are deployed in thecontext of a variety of development organizations in Ghana. In particularI analyse the processes through which such oppositions are created andsustained, the different meanings these terms ethnographically acquire,and the debates they frame.

Policy and practice

A number of anthropological accounts have attempted to deconstruct theopposition between policy and practice by focusing on the relationshipsand processes that this distinction hides. This perspective has been import-ant in highlighting how the apparently objective and neutral discourses ofpolicy makers conceal a complex micro-politics. For example, Apthorpeargues that ‘the plainer (. . .) or clearer (. . .) a policy is painted, the moreit is driven by disguise’ (1997: 45). Although this critique raises importantpolitical issues, I think that the language of concealment is itself conceal-ing in certain respects. In particular, a focus on what policy hides largelyobscures a more ethnographic understanding of the various ways in whichinformants themselves understand what ‘policy’ is. By contrast I employ a

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series of ethnographic vignettes in order to examine when and how ideasof ‘policy’ are evoked, and what these ideas are evoked against. As such myinterest is in how the distinction between policy and practice operates asan opposition. The following account, based on participant observation in alarge donor-funded public reform project, thus interrogates how thevarious actors associated with it use and understand the concepts of ‘policy’and ‘practice’.

In line with international donor policy more generally, the Britishgovernment’s Department for International Development (DfID) hasrecently emphasized ‘good governance’ as both the means and end ofbringing about ‘development’. As part of a commitment to these ideas,DfID has pursued a number of public sector reform projects in Ghana,aiming to improve the ‘responsiveness’ and ‘accountability’ of a variety ofpublic organizations. My account focuses on one of these, the Forest SectorDevelopment Project (FSDP), based in the headquarters of the ForestryCommission in Ghana’s capital Accra. The project aimed to bring about‘organizational development’ and was administered by a firm of privateconsultants, comprising both European ex-pats and Ghanaian university-educated elites. As one of the ex-patriate project staff elucidated during apresentation to Forestry Commission district managers, this entailed‘moving from a culture based on who you know, on patronage and onnetworking, to one based on rule-based mechanisms’. In this respect theFSDP staff imagined themselves as ‘enabling’ a process that ForestryCommission employees would bring about of their own accord. A keyaspect of this role was to provide ‘policy support’ (Figure 1). As a projectsummary outlined, this entailed providing the Forestry Commission with a‘consistent and coherent top-down mandate . . . for change’. Underpinninga variety of project activities was a set of beliefs about their own role ascreators and enactors of ‘policy’.

As part of the FSDP commitment to building increased ‘accountability’and ‘responsiveness’ within the Forestry Commission, a series of workshopswere convened intended to ‘build the capacity’ of ‘civil society’ and‘relevant stakeholders’. These meetings were largely attended by represen-tatives of national and international non-governmental organizations(NGOs) with interests in forestry issues. A number of community-basedorganizations (CBOs) were also invited, as were a number of chiefs in theircapacity as representatives of the perspective of those communities whoselivelihoods depended on access to forestry.2 As explicitly stated in the intro-ductory speech to one of these workshops, part of the FSDP’s reason forholding these was to ‘reduce the distance between policy and practice’. Onthe one hand it was suggested that NGOs and communities operate withoutsufficient awareness of the ‘policy context’, leading to lack of coherence.On the other hand the FSDP representative acknowledged that policymakers often lack sufficient understanding of the ‘practice’ of the variousorganizations present. From the perspective of the FSDP, ‘policy’ and

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‘practice’ were distinct but mutually enabling perspectives on a problemthat both parties shared. The recognition of a ‘gap’ between these providedthe justification for the workshop itself and ultimately legitimated FSDP’sown activities to ‘bridge’ this. As Apthorpe (1997) notes, the fabricationand presentation of such ‘gaps’ is central to the way in which policy makersexercise power, contributing to the formulation of ‘problems’ in terms thatthen justify the intervention of the particular kinds of ‘solutions’ thatdevelopment workers offer.

Yet as Cooper (Cooper and Packard, 1997) notes, development ideasspread out from key institutions and are transformed and appropriated inoften unanticipated ways. The opposition between policy and practice,itself an artefact of the institutional practices of development organizations,circulates beyond these and at times provided the very terms in which theiractivities were called into question. Thus, during one of the FSDP work-shops, the contested nature of the relationship between these parties wasdramatically foregrounded through a talk given by the government repre-sentative of the Ministry of Forestry and Mining. While the talk wasostensibly uncontroversial, outlining the National Biodiversity Strategy forGhana, summarizing the ministry’s policy and its basis in international

Institutional Arena

POLICY SUPPORT

ORGANISATIONALDEVELOPMENT

CIVIL SOCIETY SUPPORT

STRONG ‘BOTTOM UP’DEMAND FOR CHANGE (Services & Accountability)

CONSISTENT AND COHERENT‘TOP DOWN’ MANDATE AND COALITION FOR CHANGE

Lobbies

Competition Markets

Divine

Inte

rven

tion

TradeCultural

Subversion

Figure 1 Diagram produced by FSDP to illustrate the kind of ‘environ-ment’ in which effective organizational development takes place



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convention, it met with hostile response from a number of the workshopdelegates. During the questions that followed, participants highlighted the‘gap’, as they saw it, between the ‘rhetoric’ of the report and the ‘realities’of the situation ‘on the ground’. Various participants highlighted theproblems they have encountered despite the Forestry Commission’s recentinitiatives: logging revenue fails to benefit the communities; timbercontractors remain unregulated; and ‘corrupt’ politicians only serve tomake the problems worse. A particularly trenchant critique came from thechief of a community in which illegal logging was prevalent, who high-lighted the disjunction between the discourse employed by the represen-tative from the ministry and the problems he saw in his own community:

I am looking at how a scientific word like ‘biodiversity’ is going to be explainedto my mother; how are we really going to get these issues down to the ground?A lot of money is being sunk into these projects, and we don’t need to be goingto conferences when nothing is happening. So the question I am asking is whatmeasures are being put in place to ensure that the projects reach the grassroots?

In response the ministry representative did not dispute the differencebetween the ‘policies’ he had earlier outlined and the ‘practices’ of thoseworking to alleviate the environmental problems. Rather he claimed: ‘I’mjust a civil servant sitting in an office in Accra, I can bring the idea to you,but you are there with the communities. You have to make the policies intopractice.’ As such, he opposed the role of ‘policy makers’ in Accra to therole of those putting these ‘into practice’ at the ‘community level’. Fromthis perspective the role of civil servants was simply to ‘bring the ideas’.

By contrast, NGO and community representatives construed theabsence of ‘action’ as a failure of government duty. From their point ofview, ‘policy’ was not simply a neutral set of ideas or perspectives, but themeans by which their own understandings of the situation were concealed,and the inaction of the government justified. As such, NGO andcommunity representatives contested the organizers’ view of the workshopas a neutral space for the meeting of perspectives, highlighting the extentto which endless workshops have failed to redress the problems that theysee. In this context, an axiomatic opposition between ‘policy’ and ‘practice’acted to frame a set of wider debates about the role of donors and govern-ment in the process of development. What became contested was not theopposition itself but the extent to which policies, and by extension govern-ment, could bring about change. The distinction between ‘policy’ and‘practice’ therefore acted to cohere differences of opinion not reducible tothe binary terms of the opposition through which they were made toappear.

In this instance the distinction between ‘policy’ and ‘practice’ framedan opposition between the government and Forestry Commission, on theone hand, and a variety of ‘stakeholders’ representing organizations and



communities working in the forest sector on the other. However, at othertimes the same opposition was used to frame a different set of distinctions.

Staring out through the reflective glass of the FSDP project head-quarters, the project leader often remarked that ‘this is not reality’. Inmaking this startling claim, he foregrounded his own detachment from thespecific workings of the project. This detachment was less explicitlyconcretized in the office architecture in a quite literal sense. While theproject manager sat in a large air-conditioned room, other members of the project were located elsewhere in the building. The virtues of suchdetachment, he often claimed, lay in the extent to which it facilitated the‘strategic thinking’ necessary for creating and implementing good policy.As he once explained to me, ‘my role is to manage everything, from thewhole system to individual cognition’. In his view effective management wasonly possible by reducing the complexity of the system he oversees. ‘I runa forestry project’, he wryly told me, ‘but I don’t think I’ve seen a tree thewhole of the time I’ve been in Ghana.’ For him complexity was synonymouswith the ‘practice’ of the day-to-day operations of the project and effectivepolicy making was seen to depend upon stepping outside of this. Throughforegrounding absence of knowledge about the project’s specificities, hehighlighted his own far-sightedness and ability to think strategically. Fromthis perspective, his own concern with ‘policy’ was opposed to the ‘practice’of other members of the FSDP, whose role it was to act on these.

However, while the opposition between policy and practice at timesdelimited distinctions internal to the project, at other times it was used toarticulate a difference between the FSDP and various other organizations.While the manager sometimes contrasted his own ‘detachment’ with thatof other project staff, project staff employed a similar opposition, in assert-ing the desirability of their own detachment from what they termed the ‘day-to-day practice’ of the Forestry Commission. In both instances,detachment from ‘practice’ was seen as positive, enabling ‘vision’ and ‘over-sight’. Since detachment is always relative, policy from one perspective canbe rendered as practice from another.

Although FSDP employees often spoke of the importance of detach-ment, this was only regarded as positive so long as a ‘connection’ was main-tained. At times project staff themselves highlighted the potential problemsthat occurred when their own activities became divorced from the existing‘practice’ of the Forestry Commission. In this way they suggested that if youare ‘out of touch’ with what actually goes on then it is impossible to bringabout change. Similarly, in criticizing the activities of various donor organiz-ations, the project manager highlighted the extent to which their policieswere ‘out of touch with reality’. In this vein he once described UnitedNations (UN) and World Bank officials as ‘living in a bureaucratic bubble’,suggesting that ‘they come and go without leaving any footprints in thesand of Ghanaian reality’. In making such claims he foregrounded his own

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relative proximity to the ‘practice’ of a development project and the accessthis gave him to ‘Ghanaian reality’.

Much of the recent anthropological work on policy has beenconcerned to deconstruct the claims of policy makers. In this vein anthro-pologists have criticized their failure to take sufficient account of the ‘prac-tices’ of particular communities (e.g. Fairhead and Leach, 1997), and havealso pointed to the ways in which policy conceals the ‘practices’ throughwhich policy is itself produced (Apthorpe, 1997; Arce, 2000; Harper, 1998).As such, the critique of ‘policy’ entails the analytic invocation of thecategory of ‘practice’. As for many development workers, ‘practice’ comesto stand for that which is more ‘real’, ‘specific’ and ‘local’. Such approachesshed light on the institutional contexts in which particular kinds of idea emerge. However, they ignore the ambiguous and divergent meaningsthe term ‘policy’ ethnographically acquires. Moreover, since the decon-struction of policy has often left the category of ‘practice’ analytically intact,little attention has focused on the category of ‘practice’ as a meaningfuland sometimes contested concept within a variety of institutional contexts.By contrast, a focus on the ways in which actors themselves deploy anopposition between policy and practice highlights the relational ways inwhich this is employed and the different agendas that people articulatethrough it.

Local and global

As with the opposition between policy and practice, the opposition betweenlocal and global is central to both a variety of development discourses andto anthropology’s own analytic vocabulary. Thus, in seeking to understandthe various ways in which they intersect and relate, anthropologists havetaken ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ as inherently separate, if combinable,elements of analysis (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993; Hannerz, 1987).In particular, anthropological accounts of development have often takenthis opposition as axiomatic, criticizing the ‘global’ discourses of develop-ment for failing to account for the particular ‘local’ social and culturalrealities upon which they seek to intervene. As Lowenhaupt Tsingpersuasively argues in relation to anthropological theorizing moregenerally, this local–global dichotomy has been unhelpful since, ‘by lettingthe global appear homogenous, we open the door to its predictability andevolutionary status as the latest stage in macro-narratives’ (2005: 58). Indoing so, she suggests that anthropologists have failed to appreciate thecontingent practices and alliances through which ideas of ‘the global’ arebrought into being, and the often competing visions that these ideas serve.Borrowing from this perspective, I suggest the need to interrogate the insti-tutional contexts in which different visions of both ‘the global’ and ‘thelocal’ are produced.

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My analysis extends ideas developed in the preceding section, byexamining how this very opposition is created and understood in thecontext of the Wenchi District Natural Resource Management Project(WEDLAN), a four-year project funded by the international NGO Care.The project sought to reduce the incidence of bushfire in the Wenchiregion by increasing awareness of its causes and consequences, andthrough reducing dependency on slash-and-burn agriculture. To this end,four Ghanaian staff were employed to ‘build the capacity’ of their ‘localpartner’ NGO, the Farmers’ Service and Credit Union (FASCU). FASCU inturn undertook to build the capacity of the eight target communitiesthrough helping them to form organizations, identify developmentpriorities and ultimately apply for funding from other sources. As such,Care saw its role as that of ‘enabler’ and ‘facilitator’ of a process that wouldideally come from the communities themselves.

Project activities were explicitly justified by a ‘participatory’ approach todevelopment, in which the combination of ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms ofknowledge was regarded as a key requisite for successful development. Inline with advocates in other parts of the world, project staff described thisapproach in distinction to other kinds of development approaches in which‘experts’ with ‘specialist knowledge’ impose technocratic solutions in locallyinsensitive ways (Chambers, 1983, 1995). Thus the participatory approachstresses the mutually complementary ways in which ‘experts’ and ‘villagers’relate. In this view, villagers are regarded as active participants in the processof arriving at solutions, possessing knowledge and experiences which arevaluable and crucial to the successful implementation of any project.

In this vein the WEDLAN project leader elucidated the central import-ance of ‘local knowledge’ during a meeting in which she outlined therationale behind the end-of-project review to project staff: ‘Normallyprojects are evaluated from outside’, she said. ‘Experts come and they sayhow they think the project has worked from their outside perspective, butfor this one, we wanted the impression of insiders.’ Rather than evaluatethe project according to ‘external’ criteria, the process would seek to eluci-date what the community members ‘themselves thought’. As a means to thisend, the review was carried out with the collaboration of ‘communitymembers’. ‘Local knowledge’ was thus regarded as a ‘necessary’ part of anydevelopment intervention, but was not seen to be sufficient on its own.Thus she explained to staff:

There are two angles. There is what the community see – their perceptions –but there is also our angle. It is our business to try and find out the underlyingreasons based on the broader picture.

From this perspective, the review process would go beyond the beliefs ofparticular villages to gain an understanding of the ‘broader picture’ and of‘what was really going on’. The ‘local’ beliefs of the community members,though important, were not by themselves taken as an indication of the



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‘actual causes’. These beliefs needed to be set alongside the perceptions ofother communities as well as statistics on such things as rainfall patternsand bush-fire incidence. In this view, the ‘global knowledge’ of develop-ment workers is regarded as a necessary and indispensable part of theprocess, enabling the ‘truth’ of the situation to be gauged, and ‘perception’to be separated from ‘reality’. As the following ethnographic vignette eluci-dates, these categorical distinctions were created through the everydayorganizational practices of the project.

Early one morning I travelled to one of the eight villages in which theWEDLAN project was being implemented, accompanied by the projectcoordinator and a civil servant from the Ministry of Farming andAgriculture (MOFA). After two hours driving along unpaved, heavily pot-holed roads we arrived at Akenyakrom where we climbed out of the air-conditioned cabin and into the humid heat of the day. Small tsetse fliesbuzzed about, biting us incessantly and forcing us to borrow long-sleevedshirts from the villagers. ‘It’s a different world’, Simon remarked, and onthe surface it seemed to be.

Yet as the ‘action plan’ was brought out and the meeting commenced,echoes of elsewhere soon become apparent. The action plan was framed interms familiar from project documents and the meeting took the same formas those I had attended in other villages. Akenyakrom is an Ewe fishingvillage on the Black Volta River and the project was intended to address theproblem of declining fish stocks. One of the village elders told me that hisancestors came up the river from the south of Ghana when the fish wereplentiful, but in recent years people have started to use fish-poisons so thatnow it is difficult to make a living. As we walked to view the fishpond theywere in the process of constructing the MOFA expert explained theproblems of the village in more technical language, suggesting that thefishpond would give them an ‘alternative livelihood’, reducing their depen-dency on the river, leading to a more sustainable use of the land. ‘Lime isnormally used to regulate the pH’, he explained, ‘but in places like this, youneed to work with what is locally available.’ At the pond, he took the pHreading using a small testing kit and advised them that manure would needto be added regularly. After less than an hour, we left the village.

Through these practices and activities the ‘local knowledge’ of ‘thevillage’ is made evident against the ‘global knowledge’ of the ‘developmentworker’. In this interaction Simon and the MOFA representative are bothin their different ways cast as ‘experts’ with ‘technical knowledge’, whichacts to define them as distinct from the villagers with their ‘local’ knowl-edge. As ‘experts’, their role turns on their capacity to embody connectionsto people, things and ideas beyond the village itself. It is only by bringingthese connections into view that the distinction is made evident.

As Law (1994) argues, dualisms are brought into being throughmaterials and technologies that create particular kinds of order. In theWEDLAN project, connections are created between otherwise dispersed



villages by the technical capabilities of the pick-up truck, which, like thetrain described by de Certeau, can be seen as ‘a tireless shifter producingchanges in the relationships between immobile elements’ (1984: 112).Perhaps more importantly, various processes of mapping and documen-tation acted to make these villages visible to project staff simultaneously andas a whole (cf. Latour, 1999). While Care employees only have limitedknowledge of the ‘local situation’ in Akenyakrom, such organizationallycoordinated processes make it possible to get an understanding of the‘broader picture’. In this way, for example, the population and ecologicalcharacteristics of all the villages in which Care is working are madeaccessible through such artefacts as the ‘causal flow diagram’ and ‘resourcemap’, compiled on the basis of interviews and focus groups. Through these the project is able to identify the ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ of ecologicaldegradation in each of the areas.

Henkel and Stirrat (2001) argue in relation to ‘participatory’ mapsthat, insofar as these already frame what can and cannot be represented,they open up the local to a global view. If development expertise inheresin the capacity to aggregate different ‘local situations’, this only becomespossible through such cartographic and bureaucratic processes. Similarlythe MOFA expert’s technical understanding of fishponds and the pHtesting kit enable him to bring to the village knowledge that those whoexcavated the pond did not have. As a form of ‘black box’ (Latour, 1987)the testing kit itself embodies understandings which aggregate knowledgefrom many different times and places.

Although the distinction between the ‘global’ knowledge of thedevelopment workers and the ‘local knowledge’ of community was oftenseen in absolute terms, it only existed as a product of various practicesinvolving particular associations of people and things. The developmentworkers’ ‘specialist’ perspective is not simply a product of a cognitivelydifferent ‘world view’. It inheres in the capacity they have to create con-nections between otherwise unrelated people and things.

In this sense, the distinction between ‘local’ and ‘global’ kinds ofknowledge was not a rigid one. Rather it was a contingent outcome of acomplex set of organizational practices. Accordingly, it was only madeapparent in certain contexts. Although Care project staff were regarded incertain instances as embodying a ‘global’ perspective, at other times theyforegrounded their identities as ‘local’ or ‘Ghanaian’. In the context ofCare’s wider commitments to a ‘participatory’ approach, the fact theproject employed ‘local’ staff was seen in a positive light. While most camefrom other parts of Ghana and even from other ethnic groups, knowledgeof the ‘local language’ (twi) and of social niceties and formalities were seenas an asset that ‘foreign’ aid workers lacked.3 Here their identity as ‘local’was not simply a default category but had to be actively made visible as such(cf. Edwards, 1994; Ferguson, 1999). For example, when attending work-shops, Ghanaian NGO workers often chose to wear ‘local batik’ and more

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explicitly foregrounded their ‘local perspective’ derived from upbringingsin ‘the village’. The demonstration of such ‘local’ identities and perspec-tives required active work and was performed through the material andverbal elicitation of particular people, places and ideas.

In life history interviews, Ghanaian development workers often spokemore explicitly about the importance of their upbringing in ‘the village’and highlighted the ‘local knowledge’ and ‘local perspective’ that this gavethem (Yarrow, 2008). For example, in talking about her own upbringingRose Mensah-Kutin, director of a women’s NGO, Abantu, described theways in which this shaped her perspective:

You don’t have to be continually in the village to make a contribution . . . andtherefore in my work I always articulate issues with that perspective in mind andthere is always a sense of where I am coming from in my discussion of the issues.

Cooper (Cooper and Packard, 1997) argues that concepts of ‘indigen-ous’ and ‘local’ can be useful even where they refer to political and socialrelationships far less bounded than the terms suggest. In this way villageelders in the communities in which Care worked at times chose tostrategically erase their connections to the wider world. The archaeologistStahl notes that in the Wenchi district in which the project was based‘people operate simultaneously in overlapping landscapes of various scalethat link town and country, city and prairie, coast and interior’ (2001: 43).Similarly, the anthropologists Dunn and Robertson (1973) describe theextent of geographical mobility in the region, noting how cola traders comeand go, farmers send their children to schools throughout Ghana, andmodern communications facilitate travel to and awareness of the widerworld. At times resistance to the WEDLAN project came about through thedissolution and non-recognition of the local/global dichotomy that projectactivities engendered. For example, pleas for help were sometimes voicedin the context of pre-existing social or kin relations to project staff.Attempts by project staff to elicit ‘local opinion’ were also sometimesfrustrated by non-participation in focus groups and mapping exercises. Yet,in certain moments project ‘beneficiaries’ recognized the strategic possi-bilities of speaking from the perspective of ‘the local’, using the project’sown rhetoric to highlight the project’s various failings. Similarly, projectemployees’ ability to convincingly speak from a ‘local perspective’ oftenconferred legitimacy, and was used in pointing to the limitations of wider‘global’ discourses of development in the context of their own particularknowledge and understandings.

In this sense, the opposition between local and global was employedrelationally to make a variety of contextual distinctions and to perform arange of shifting identities. However, in certain moments the distinctionwas entirely absent. For example, one of the Care staff had family in Banda,a beneficiary of the project. During visits, he would often stop to drop offprovisions such as kerosene and canned foods. In this context, his status asan employee of an international NGO made him a ‘big man’ (Price, 1974)

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and brought with it certain expectations and obligations relating to hisroles and responsibilities to family and friends. In these interactions hisidentity was framed in terms of culturally specific understandings aboutkinship, reciprocity and the desirability of circulating wealth (Oppong,1981). In the absence of the organizational technologies through which theproject enacted a local/global contrast, his distinctiveness was neitherpresented nor understood in these terms.

Critiques of ‘participatory’ development approaches (Bornstein, 2003;Englund, 2006; Henkel and Stirrat, 2001; Kothari, 2001; Nelson and Wright,1995) have often highlighted the ways in which an overtly progressiverhetoric has been used to entrench inequality by reinforcing differences ofstatus between project beneficiaries on the one hand and developmentprofessionals on the other. While a consideration of the political impli-cations of such projects is clearly important, I would suggest that thesecritiques have often themselves enacted a rather binary distinction betweendevelopment workers on the one hand and communities on the other. Yet,as the preceding examples demonstrate, such discourses are used by avariety of actors and in support of sometimes divergent claims. Accordingly,these terms are used to negotiate forms of power which cannot themselvesbe understood in terms of a local/global contrast.

Recent theorists of globalization within anthropology and the socialsciences more generally have opposed the homogenization of ‘the global’to the heterogeneity and difference that exists at the ‘local’ level. As such,anthropological critiques of development have often called for increasingsensitivity to ‘local knowledge’ or ‘local agendas’ (e.g. Arce and Long, 2000;Mawdsley et al., 2002). By contrast, my account demonstrates how in thecontext of participatory development interventions, formulations of ‘thelocal’ as much as ‘the global’ arise out of internationally recognizableorganizational processes. Where the very opposition between ‘local’ and‘global’ is an artefact of organizational practice, the analytic use of theseterms conceals the complex social processes through which this is createdand deployed. In different ways, these examples show how an ostensiblysimplistic opposition between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ is enabled by acomplex set of bureaucratic and social processes. As with an oppositionbetween policy and practice, this distinction was not simply given but wasactively brought into view through the various activities of project staff.Although an opposition between the local and global was for the most partaxiomatic, it was used to draw distinctions in ways that were highly fluid andoften unpredictable.

Conclusion: the multiplicity of dualism

Anthropological studies of development have been critical of dualisms andoppositions on the grounds that these conceal the complexities of socialreality for development workers and for scholars alike (Crewe and



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Harrison, 1998; Escobar, 1995; Gardner and Lewis, 1996). Against thisprevailing critical deconstructive approach my account suggests the needto understand the social contexts in which dualisms are created, and thevarious uses to which they may be put. Rather than view these as opposedto ‘reality’, my account demonstrates how oppositions are in fact integralto the ways in which relationships are formed and negotiated in the contextof development interventions. A focus on the related oppositions between‘local’ and ‘global’ and ‘policy’ and ‘practice’ highlights the complex andhighly specific organizational processes through which such oppositionsare created and sheds light on the ways in which these are used to framesocial relations and identities.

While anthropologists have criticized the dualisms central to develop-ment as ‘static’ (Crewe and Harrison, 1998; Gardner and Lewis, 1996), anethnographic account of how these operate illuminates the highly dynamicways in which they are socially and discursively employed. Oppositionsbetween policy and practice and the local and the global are created andevoked by a variety of different actors and are used in the service of diverseagendas. Although such terms may be employed to consolidate power, theyalso become the means by which government and donor agendas areresisted. As such they come to structure social interactions, mediateidentities and frame political encounters whose own complexity is notreducible to the opposition itself (cf. Pigg, 1997; Yarrow, in press). Thus thearticle demonstrates the relational ways in which oppositions are drawnupon, and the highly specific distinctions that they are used to make.4Against the grain of recent anthropological approaches to development,this perspective suggests that the extent to which such oppositions areuseful or problematic, empowering or disempowering, can only be gaugedin relation to specific encounters.

Academic critiques have often highlighted the ways in which dualismssimplify (Arce, 2000; Escobar, 1995), presenting aspects of the realities theydescribe in terms of a binary logic. As such these should not be taken atface value, and indeed my own account highlights some of the social andorganizational practices that reproduce this logic. However, it is importantto note that such oppositions were also employed by development workersand beneficiaries in pointing to concealed complexities. Critiques of thereductionism of ‘policy’ invoked the overlooked specificities and com-plexities of ‘practice’, just as development’s ‘global’ knowledge was some-times seen to be insufficiently responsive to the demands of ‘local’ people.Neither inherently simple nor complex, oppositions are therefore import-ant in terms of the ways in which they enable development workers tomanage complexity, by foregrounding certain kinds of knowledge andinformation and selectively erasing others.

At a more general level my account points to the limitations of anthropological studies of development in which critical engagement isassumed as a starting point of analysis. In focusing on what development



interventions conceal, anthropological accounts frequently reproduce thelogic of intervention without contributing to an understanding of whypeople find these logics persuasive. Even less overtly ‘applied’ anthro-pologists have themselves attempted to show how development could bebetter or more effective, pointing to the limitations of developmentinterventions (both at a specific and general level) and the problematicassumptions that underpin them. My point is not that anthropologistsshould avoid criticism of development interventions, which may indeedhave problematic consequences. Rather I argue that anthropologicalaccounts can most helpfully comment on such interventions on the basisof ethnographic research that does not assume that critique should provide both the means and ends of anthropological engagement. Infailing to extend the same degree of relativism to development workers thatanthropologists have afforded to more traditional subjects of inquiry, wefail to comprehend the complex range of actors and ideas that develop-ment organizations enjoin. Critical engagement often seems to curtailunderstanding.

While I have argued that anthropology and development employsimilar discursive forms, I therefore want to call attention to the differentways in which they use these and to the potential utility and importance ofthis difference. Cooper and Packard note that:

the historian’s or anthropologist’s concern with context and complexity isneither more nor less separable from a self-serving professionalism than thedevelopment practitioner’s concern with the replicability of project design, thedesire for stable decision-making frameworks, and the need for quick andreadily graspable analysis of the specificity of each case in which action is beingtaken. (1997: 26)

These professional differences are often the cause of misunderstand-ings and disagreements: while anthropologists frequently chastise develop-ment workers for their lack of social and cultural knowledge, developmentworkers at times regard this knowledge as unnecessarily complex and pointto the difficulty of applying it. Conceived in abstract or analytic terms, thesedistinct standpoints often seem to point to an intractable difference. Yet, aswith the oppositions on which this article has focused, the oppositionbetween anthropology and development itself frames a variety of socialencounters and the tensions that these engender often have productiveeffects. Anthropology, like development, consists in the intersection of acomplex range of actors, agendas and ideas, hence these encounters takemany forms. Yet in all of these it is important to highlight how differencecan be productive. Anthropological theories and methods enable a form ofdetachment that frames and enables various kinds of engagement.

While my account has focused on the ways in which oppositions aredrawn upon in the context of development interventions in Ghana, Isuggest that the approach has broader applicability in terms of understand-ing the operation of other kinds of dualism (cf. Yarrow, forthcoming).

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Although a deconstructive approach sheds light on the analytic limitationsof a variety of dualisms, including those between ‘indigenous’ and‘Western’ (e.g. Kuper, 2005) and ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ (e.g.Hobsbawm, 1983), it directs attention away from the various ways in whichthese are utilized in the context of actual social encounters. Thus I suggestthat, rather than seek to dissolve oppositions as the illusory products ofwhat are purported to be more ‘real’ social practices, analysis can moreusefully elucidate how such discursive forms are used to articulate varioussocial relations and political agendas. In this vein I wish to emphasize therole of oppositions as oppositions, and the reality that actors afford them assuch.

Acknowledgements

This article develops from PhD research supervised by Marilyn Strathern and SueBenson, who have both contributed greatly to the ideas developed here. I am alsograteful to those who have read and commented on earlier versions, specifically,Chantal Conneller, Duncan Garrow, John Gledhill, Maia Green, Paul Henley,Annelise Riles, Anthony Simpson and Soumhya Venkatessan. Research was madepossible by PhD funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, andadditional fieldwork was funded by the Smuts Fund. A Leverhulme Early CareerFellowship provided the opportunity to develop this research in its current form.

Notes

1 For example, Fabian (1983) argues that anthropologists create an oppositionbetween themselves and their objects of study (‘the Other’) and in doing sosuppress the complexities of the ethnographic encounter.

2 Prior to Ghana’s independence in 1957, the institution of chieftaincy wascentral to the way in which the British administered the Gold Coast through asystem of ‘indirect rule’. In the decade preceding independence, chiefs wereincreasingly politically, economically and juridically marginalized throughlegislative reform and through state narratives that cast them as antithetical tothe development of a ‘modern’ state (Rathbone, 2000) More recently, however,the role of chiefs as ‘partners in development’ has been emphasized by theright-wing NPP government as well as by NGOs, which are increasinglyemploying ‘indigenous knowledge’ discourses (Yarrow, in press).

3 In the context of Malawi, Englund (2006) describes how participatory develop-ment projects similarly act to create a distinction between development workers and the communities in which they work by re-casting already existinglinguistic and cultural knowledge as ‘expertise’.

4 This idea draws upon Strathern’s (1988) model of gender in Melanesia, wherean apparently simple opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ disguises thehighly relational ways in which this opposition is elicited as a matter of sociallife.

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■ Thomas Yarrow holds a Leverhulme Fellowship in Anthropology at the Universityof Manchester, focusing on the Volta Resettlement Project in Ghana. His PhDresearch focused on knowledge, ideology and interpersonal relations amongGhanaian development workers. [email: [email protected]]

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