Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future (review)

In Delivering Development, Edward R. Carr tackles the assumptions that found prevailing understandings of conventional development and globalization. These were assumptions that materially affect the recipients of socalled development. Meanwhile, the focus of the book is twofold: economic opportunity and security, along with environmental change, both of which have been explored as the primary variables of vulnerability and opportunity for making a livelihood in developing areas.

Delivering Development is structured around the metaphor of “globalization’s shoreline,” which Carr uses to illustrate the ebb-and-flow experience of globalization and deglobalization in developing-world communities or along the “shoreline.” Tying into the well-recognized assertion that global markets produce inequalities and fail to improve living conditions in certain parts of the world, Carr goes on to argue that development in “shoreline” communities has not failed, but has, in fact, negatively shaped the livelihoods practiced today.

The book focuses on twelve years of fieldwork conducted in two villages— Dominase and Ponkrum—in Ghana’s Central Region, where dynamics of global economic and political decision-making have played out in the forms of economic opportunity and vulnerability. Carr draws on qualitative and quantitative ethnographic as well as archaeological fieldwork in the area to demonstrate that people labeled poor and in need of development are in fact constantly changing their livelihood practices to take advantage of opportunities. Poverty in this region and across “globalization’s shoreline” does not exist in spite of development, but because of it.

Carr’s purpose in writing this book is to raise critical awareness of development’s effect on creating poverty along “globalization’s shoreline,” and he does so in two parts, made up of fourteen chapters.

Chapters one through seven focus on Dominase and Ponkrum. There, Carr presents an historical perspective to trace the changes that development has effected in the livelihoods of these villages, relying on a combination of methods, including archaeology, survey, and local knowledge from elderly residents. Utilizing archaeological data to describe the villages up until the 1960s and 1970s, when many compounds in Dominase were abandoned, Carr demonstrates a previous community that was significantly more affluent than the one found there today: the inhabitants of the villages benefitted from growing nonfarm employment opportunities, a cash-crop market, and transportation infrastructure.

The use of archaeological methods to explore livelihood strategies is an underutilized approach in development studies, where time-depth is more commonly achieved through oral histories and officially documented accounts; however, archaeology enables Carr to address a gap in local knowledge: few residents alive today lived in the villages in the 1960s, and among them are only a few men. Relying on these men’s memories is problematic, given the differences in strategies undertaken by men and women and documented by Carr here and elsewhere. The stories told by the archaeological remains of the past demonstrate the material affluence experienced by the inhabitants of the area during almost the last two hundred years. This examination of the archaeological remains allows Carr to pinpoint when the village experienced major landscape changes as the settlement grew in population and wealth. Decreasing economic success is also visible, evidenced in a decrease in the disposal of luxury goods, as well as the abandonment of many compounds as families moved on to other regions in search of economic opportunities.

Consequently, in historical terms Carr can situate the fluctuating economic success in the region beyond the limitations of living memory within the villages. He then compares historical patterns to quantitative and qualitative ethnographic data describing the livelihood strategies of men and women in the villages. He explores gendered power dynamics by comparing men’s and women’s strategies in both male- and female-headed households, and he traces out the structural constraints that gendered practices place on different members of households. Over the course of multiple field seasons, he documents changing strategies year to year, as residents anticipate and react to rising economic opportunities and environmental...