A Double Standard in Development Encounters: Language and the Making of Green Entrepreneurs in Tanzania

International aid interventions can perpetuate the inequalities they claim to redress. Indeed, anthropological research on development has shown how many of the structures and practices of contemporary programs draw on colonial modes of social differentiation to exert control. This article identifies yet another mechanism of such differentiation that emerges in development encounters—those moments of social interaction between development professionals and the people they view as target beneficiaries. Drawing on ethnographic research from a biosphere in Tanzania, where development professionals aimed to convert poor farmers into green entrepreneurs by way of changing their “mentality,” I argue that a double standard in language ideology is a key mechanism through which efforts to empower become efforts to control. This double standard in language ideology recognizes language as a tool for some and as a mere reflection of belief for others. With such a double standard at work, participants in the green entrepreneurship program, and development workshops more generally, have to navigate the awkward politics of inhabiting and animating the limited roles that the international aid industry casts for them. Moreover, despite holding a language ideology that overlooks program participants’ creative capacity to use language instrumentally, development professionals depend upon participants’ choices to linguistically cooperate in workshops and meetings to claim success. I argue that this double standard in language ideology is an important means through which campaigns to empower the poor relegate them to subordinate roles instead.