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Abstract
What role have the processes and institutions of international development played in creating and propagating ideas around the world? This paper demonstrates that networks of development-focused civil society institutions can form global epistemic bridges even where communication technology, global markets, infrastructure, or state services do not reach. Given the penetration of these ‘civil society knowledge networks’ throughout the world, it is crucial to understand how these networks form, and how they create and spread ideas, mediating between global discourses and local needs. This paper builds on a multi-sited case study of one such civil society knowledge network, which includes an international foundation, its partner non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Kenya, and one village where these NGOs run a forest conservation project. The case study provides a closely textured analysis of the mechanisms of knowledge production and consumption in the network, including personality politics, language, technology, political connections and the power dynamics of knowledge flows. It demonstrates the ways remoteness and disconnection are overcome through the epistemic reach of institutional networks involved in development interventions.
Notes
1. This work is based on interviews and participant observation conducted in Kenya and the US between 2011 and 2014. Interviews in San Francisco, Nairobi and Isiolo were conducted in English. Interviews in Beliqo were conducted in a mixture of English and Borana, and translated by Salad Choki. Unless otherwise noted, the quotes and observations are drawn from the author’s interview notes, recordings and field notes.
2. The Christensen Fund was founded in 1957 with a focus on the acquisition and promotion of ‘non-European’ art. Since the 1980s its mission has expanded to include the preservation of not only artistic expression but also the landscapes that play a key role in artistic production. Starting with the 2002 hire of Ken Wilson as its executive director, the fund has focused on promoting biocultural diversity. This focus was brought to the foundation by Wilson, and he believes that the fund has played a key role since the early 2000s in putting biocultural diversity on the global development and funding map (Wilson, 3 October 2013). The arguments around biodiversity were first formalised in The Declaration of Belém in 1988, and the term ‘biocultural diversity’ was brought into use by Posey in 1996. Posey, “Protecting Indigenous Peoples’ Rights”; and Members of the International Society of Ethnobiology, Declaration of Belem. The idea of linking cultural and ecological concerns has gained increasing traction over the past decades, not only with the increasing prominence of climate change and other environmental concerns for big funders and with the increasing prominence of indigenous and local knowledge in both development practice and scholarship, but with the rise of research and programming that links local knowledge and climate change. Cocks, “Biocultural Diversity”; Speranza et al., “Indigenous Knowledge,” 296; and Green and Raygorodetsky, “Indigenous Knowledge of a Changing Climate,” 242.
3. The names and titles in this article are those most commonly used within the local context of the research. They have not been changed or anonymised unless requested by research participants.
4. Kenya’s northern districts have some of the highest rates of poverty, infrastructural underdevelopment and inter-ethnic violence in the country, and are viewed by many Kenyans as the wild and ungovernable ‘upcountry’.
5. The paved road is now being extended farther north, reaching towards the Ethiopian border – but until the last few years Isiolo was literally where the pavement ends.
6. Geertz, “‘Local Knowledge’ and Its Limits.”
7. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 42.
8. Burawoy,“Public Sociologies”; Ferguson, Global Shadows.
9. Dirlik, “Place-based Imagination,” 156.
10. Escobar, “Culture Sits in Place,” 156.
11. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts.”
12. Kumar, “Further Note on Civil Society.”
13. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 7–8.
14. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Kaldor, Global Civil Society; Keane, Global Civil Society?
15. Kumar, “Further Note on Civil Society”; Lewis, “Civil Society in African Contexts.”
16. Rieff, “False Dawn of Civil Society.”
17. Burawoy, “Public Sociologies,” 1616.
18. Toulmin, Role of Transnational NGOs.
19. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 22.
20. Howell and Pearce use the term ‘mainstream’ to designate development organisations (usually international institutions) that see civil society working in tandem with the market and the state to promote development through policy-focused solutions; ‘alternative’ institutions (often grassroots or advocacy NGOs) see the role of civil society as more conflictual in pointing out the power dynamics and inequalities of markets; both approaches are thus normative: they prescribe what civil society is and should be. Neither approach is necessarily ‘coherent or unified’, but strands of both will reflected by different institutions and individuals within the case study discussed here. Howell and Pearce, “Civil Society and Development,” 17.
21. Li, Will to Improve.
22. See for instance Bano, “Dangerous Correlations”; Cooley and Ron, “NGO Scramble”; Escobar, Encountering Development; Fisher, “Doing Good?”; Matanga, “NGOs and the Politics of Development”; Reimann, “Up to No Good?.”
23. For that, see amongst others Cowen and Shenton, “Development Doctrine in Africa”; Cowen and Shenton, “Invention of Development”; Easterly, Tyranny of Experts; Ferguson, Anti-Politics Machine; Scott, Seeing Like a State.
24. Which has been explored by Mosse, Cultivating Development.
25. Mosse, “Introduction.”
26. Ibid., 5.
27. Castells, “Network Society.”
28. Castells and Cardoso, Network Society; Held and McGrew, “Great Globalisation Debate.”
29. Kaldor, Global Civil Society; Keck and Sikkink, “Transnational Advocacy Networks”; Batliwala, “Grassroots Movements as Transnational Actors.”
30. Mosse, Cultivating Development, 4.
31. Burawoy, “Manufacturing the Global,” 148.
32. Urry, “Mobile Sociology”; Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System.”
33. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System,” 105.
34. Bruggeman, Social Networks.
35. Castells, “Network Society,” 7.
36. Joranson, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Knowledge Commons.”
37. Indeed, the University of Oxford plays a key role in the formation of this research – the project was conceived and carried out while the author was based at Oxford between 2010 and 2015. Both Ken Wilson and Wolde Tadasse (the Christensen Fund’s East Africa Programme Manager at the time) have personal and scholarly connections to faculty members in the Department of International Development and the African Studies Centre at Oxford, and it is these faculty members who initially connected me with TCF (namely Wolde, who lives in Oxford because his wife works there), who in turn introduced me to both Ken Wilson, and to Dr Hussein.
38. Hassan Shano has been gaoled for his part in several land-rights demonstrations.
39. Borana is Hassan Shano’s ethnic group, but is also the ethnic group of Dr Hussein from Kivulini as well as the vast majority of the population in Beliqo – another connecting fact that is significant, but outside of the analytical scope of this work.
40. Many have to travel a long way, contending with terrible roads, insecure conditions and a lack of public transit in the region.
41. Burawoy, “Public Sociologies,” 1616.
42. Gaventa, “Finding Space for Change,” 26.
43. Fowler, “Change Actors and Civic Innovators,” 41.
44. This impulse to seek legitimacy opening up previously closed spaces is echoed in development more broadly with the rise of participatory and community-based approaches. Chambers, Rural Development.
45. Massey, “Geographies of responsibility,” 11, original emphases.
46. Lewis and Mosse, “Encountering Order and Disjuncture,” 3.
47. Mosse, Cultivating Development; Mosse, “Anti-Social Anthropology?”
48. This is a subjective observation, and is based on the brevity of the interviews, the types of questions asked (most focused on memories of the river and forest and ecological degradation over time, rather than the relationship between people, culture and river), the lack of follow-up questions, and the lack of communication of the contents of these interviews to other village residents.
49. Waso Trustland Project, Proposal of Participatory Management of Ewaso Nyiro Ecosystem.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Li, Will to Improve, 10.
53. Lewis and Mosse, “Encountering Order and Disjuncture,” 19.
54. Kaldor, Global Civil Society.
55. Ibid., 74.
56. Keck and Sikkink, “Transnational Advocacy Networks,” 89.
57. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 37.
58. Fowler, “Innovation in Institutional Collaboration,” 14.
59. Fechter and Hindman, Everyday Lives of Development Workers, 4.
60. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 39.
61. Haas, “Introduction,” 3.
62. Adler and Haas, “Conclusion,” 389.
63. Toke, “Epistemic Communities and Environmental Groups.”
64. It is notable that most of the key players in the network are men, and that gender plays a role in multiple ways in forging or blocking individual relationships and connections. It is worth noting, however, that Habiba, the female secretary of the CFA, does play a key role in the network, and was the CFA representative who travelled to WTL’s partners’ meeting. Indeed, many civically involved community members in Beliqo are female, as well as many of the students who leave Beliqo to go to high schools in the surrounding areas. To understand the gender dynamics at play here would thus take fine-grained analysis – one that is important, but unfortunately outside the scope of this paper.
65. Castells, “Network Society,” 13.
66. Whittaker, “Pursuing Pastoralists.”
67. Dahl, Suffering Grass; Wario Arero, “Coming to Kenya.”
68. Batliwala, “Grassroots Movements as Transnational Actors,” 395, 394.
69. Castells, “Network Society,” 13.
70. Fowler and Biekart, “Relocating Civil Society.”
71. Latour, Reassembling the Social.
72. Meyer, “World Society,” 4.
73. Ibid., 2.
74. Appadurai, Modernity at Large.