How Development Projects Persist: Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs by Erin Beck (review)

Poverty alleviation, empowerment, participation, and microcredit are just a few of the buzzwords associated with the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the Global South during the 1980s–1990s. And while the number of development NGOs continues to rise, critiques of the efficacy of these same organizations have dominated the new millennium. Political scientist Erin Beck’s new book, How Development Projects Persist, takes up this conundrum through an ethnographic study of two organizations operating in Guatemala to ask how NGO principles and methods matter to their outcomes and why their work persists even when they do not achieve their stated ends. Instead of asking whether these projects really work, Beck proceeds by asking what happens when NGO projects interact with local histories, perceptions, and practices. Her nuanced ethnographic portrait of these two very distinct gender-based programs ultimately reveals how project donors, practitioners, and beneficiaries respectively negotiate these projects to diverse and often very uneven ends. In doing so, her book offers a useful teaching resource for introductory anthropology or development studies courses.

Beck’s research pointedly diverges from political science macro- and institutional-level analyses of development to offer “thick description” and comparison of two development organizations that seem to be the perfect mirror opposites of one another. “Namaste” is a top-down, foreign NGO that uses a regimented, hierarchical organizational structure and a “bootstraps” social entrepreneurship model to foster economic advancement. “Fraternity” is a much more bottom-up, holistic NGO that builds on Protestant and Mayan cultural principles to cultivate women’s empowerment, combat inequality, and promote traditional values and practices. Therefore, while both organizations target similar constituencies—largely rural, indigenous women—and share a common modality—microcredit, Beck shows how their distinct ethos, organizational structures, goals, and quotidian practices shape how women experience these development projects and, ultimately, whether and how they are transformed by them. In analyzing these two cases, Beck’s bigger argument is that while these NGOs both essentialize women and position them as passive recipients of development aid, women actively negotiate development projects, reading them through the lens of past development experiences and local histories and using them toward their own ends. The lesson here is that the distinct structure and goals of each organization matter for what each is trying to do, but not always in the way the organization planned in terms of program outcomes or women’s experience of the program.

The book’s conceptual framework is mainly constructed around sociological, gender, and development studies literature, with a pithy overview of Guatemala’s development history to situate Beck’s claims about the continual repackaging of development techniques over time and space. In doing so, Beck clearly aims to speak to a wide range of social science audiences and to offer an ethnographic text that can effectively serve readers without much background knowledge on Guatemala. Given that the book engages several key issues in development studies—i.e., NGOs as development actors, gender inequality, faith-based projects, and microcredit—the background section offers a very expansive overview of the NGO literature that is straightforward and easily assimilable for undergraduate readers or non-area experts. Beck’s containment of her methodological and ethics commentary to an appendix further facilitates navigation by non-anthropology readers, while still satisfying the anthropological appetite for methodological and personal reflexivity. As one might imagine, the trade-off of this general approach is that the theoretical debates are fairly compressed—i.e., Beck reduces scholarly debates around development studies into two schools: overly theoretical post-structuralist critiques that do not recognize local agency, and technical studies that just want to get development right. In doing so, many anthropologists will quickly recognize that the text diminishes the rich field of ethnographic studies of development that has substantially nuanced these debates over the last decade. Furthermore, scholars of Guatemala will find the country background lacks some of the well-established historical sources in favor of more recent secondary...