Is the Non-unitary Subject a Plausible and Productive Way to Understand Development Bureaucrats?

Abstract

Development bureaucrats are the human instruments of the policies that mobilise funds, create organisations and underwrite interventions. For their home audiences development organisations need to present bureaucrats who are reliable instruments. In the field these same organisations need staff who can do what makes sense. This arrangement works until what makes sense in head office does not work in the field. At that point staff have to ‘marry off’ these two worlds. How these staff are understood shapes both how they can be approached by locals and how they should be supported by their organisations. This paper draws on research done in a donor organisation headquarters, in a military unit tasked with conducting development activities and at a field-level donor mission in a failed state. It explores the relevance, methods to research, the plausibility and the productivity of understanding the development bureaucrats who do this ‘marrying off’ as non-unitary subjects.

Notes

This article was only made possible through the invitation, the trust and the at times sorely tried patience of those interviewed. Turning to specific sources of guidance, the early theoretical formation provided by Ann Ferguson, Julie Graham and Sangeeta Kamat of University of Massachusetts Amherst was foundational to this project. Most recently this text is the result of substantial revisions made as the result of extraordinarily supportive critique from the editor of this issue, Anne-Meike Fechter. Credit for any contribution this article may make is, therefore, not due its named authors. It is, rather, due the history of interactions from which it has emerged. Of course, this same diffusion does not apply to the allocation of responsibility for error. That rests entirely with the authors.

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