Development anthropology and social engineering: a plea for critical reformism

Abstract

While ethnographic research can be carried out from a variety of political positionings, we plead for a ‘critical reformist’ stance, on the intersection of pure, applied and radical anthropology. We trace this positioning back to Max Weber and Karl Popper, for whom the essence of social science was to critically accompany policy processes by identifying all intended and unintended outcomes of policies. We also situate it in relation to various strands of contemporary policy ethnography. Our approach starts from the conception of a policy, reform, intervention or project as a space of confrontation of a variety of strategic groups at all stages in the policy cycle. The principle of epistemic equity tells us to give equal weight to all actors’ representations and practices. We also argue that the dimension of ‘going public’ needs to be given as much weight as the dimensions of fieldwork and writing in ethnographic research. The conception of social engineering as a political arena will also help researchers to think more strategically about how and when to engage with different types of publics in different stages of the research process.

Keywords:

• Global social engineering
• critical reformism
• epistemic equality
• public anthropology

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of the paper was presented at the CERDOTOLA conference, Yaoundé, Cameroon. The authors also thank two anonymous referees of this journal for comments on the first draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Interview in the New Statesman, 7 January 1939.

2 Cited in Joas (1996, vii).

3 The ‘Laboratoire d’études et de recherches sur les dynamiques sociales et de développement local (LASDEL) in Niger and Benin is a positive example (see Tidjani Alou 2012; Olivier de Sardan 2012).

4 See especially the contributions by Schnapper (2014) and Donzelot (2014) concerning their experiences, and sociologists working on France, with French policy circles.

5 Interestingly, the struggle over the importance of land rights only played a role in the background: in reality (or at least up to 2019), no-one was effectively evicted (Tania Li, personal correspondence).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom De Herdt

Tom De Herdt is Professor in the political and institutional aspects of development at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, Belgium. He wrote extensively on the political economy of state formation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly in the fields of (urban) poverty and education. He co-edited Real Governance and Practical Norms in Sub-Saharan Africa with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (Routledge, 2015) and Negotiating Public Services in the Congo with Kristof Titeca (Zed Books, 2019).

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan is Senior Researcher at LASDEL, Niamey, Niger (a social science institute doing qualitative research on public policies in West Africa, www.lasdel.net), and Emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). He has numerous publications in the field of development anthropology. Two of his books relate to the theme of this article: Epistemology, Fieldwork and Anthropology (Palgrave, 2015) and La revanche des contextes: des mésaventures de l’ingénierie sociale, en Afrique et au-delà (Karthala, 2021).