The Development State: aid, culture and civil society in Tanzania by Maia Green (review)

Maia Green’s The Development State offers a compelling new insight into a subject that has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years – the political economy and culture of development in contemporary Africa. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research and work as a development consultant in Tanzania, Green examines the social implications of development as an international industry and as a national project for a variety of average Tanzanian citizens at the local level. Her study is less a traditional scholarly monograph than a compilation of broad analytical essays and micro-level case studies that explore different elements of development as a system of interpersonal relations, financial flows and organizational forms.

The book begins with a short historical overview of what Green calls ‘the development state’ in Tanzania, tracing continuities in the ideological foundations and material constitution of the colonial and postcolonial state vis-à-vis its assumed imperative to improve its subjects and citizens since the early twentieth century. She then proceeds to an interrogation of contemporary developmental idioms, imaginaries, institutions and practices, focusing on current fixations with decentralization, empowerment and civil society. It is in this middle section – Chapters 2 to 6 – that the book truly shines. A key part of this inquiry explores the interplay between clunky, formulaic NGO projects undertaken in the name of abstract imperatives such as ‘good governance’ and ‘participatory development’, on the one hand, and individual Tanzanians’ efforts to concretely improve their own livelihood, status and prospects of a brighter, wealthier future on the other.

Green shows that initiatives meant to promote popular participation operate in ways that reinforce hierarchical distinctions between elite developmental actors and the objects of their intervention (defined as monolithic, static communities); by design, they foreclose substantive input from the latter. At the same time, poor Tanzanians perceive proximity to such projects and their agents as an avenue to personal self-improvement, representing access to funding, employment and an assortment of cosmopolitan possibilities. As such, standard models of engagement in the bureaucratic developmental repertoire – such as the stakeholder workshop – succeed not in achieving their ostensible objectives but in enabling forms of individual ‘development entrepreneurship’ by professionalizing the performance of participation. This phenomenon takes on especially absurd dimensions with regard to ‘capacity-building’ initiatives meant to encourage the formation of non-state organizations. Green describes the superficial enactment of an arbitrary normative notion of civil society through the generation of documents and titles as a mode of ‘anticipatory development’, in which the process of preparing oneself for inclusion within a set of vertical organizational relations comes to stand in for the actual goal of development itself. Moving forward, The Development State concludes with two chapters on anti-witchcraft services and middle-class culture respectively. These final sections depart from the themes and flow of previous sections, concerning themselves more directly with anthropological debates about the categories of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ and patterns of consumption than with contemporary forms of developmental governance.

The book’s shortcomings are few and do not substantially detract from the significance and effectiveness of its overall contributions. Green’s historical arguments are weakened by a curious decision not to include full citations of archival sources, leaving the reader with a lack of information about the identity of their authors and the context of their production that contrasts strikingly with the methodological care devoted to the presentation of contemporary texts and voices. Furthermore, the analysis in The Development State is sometimes repetitive or disjointed; at such points, the reader wishes for tighter editing to create a more streamlined, cohesive book.

On the other hand, there is much to admire about Green’s study. Like the best work of James Ferguson, The Development State combines a piercing critique of pervasive, usually externally driven, institutionally embedded ideologies about development with a thoughtful sensitivity to the personal developmental aspirations of non-elite informants, which occasionally replicate aspects of these flawed dominant paradigms but...