The Pontis Foundation: Partly Disrupting the Development Discourse Through Partnership

Abstract

The article analyses the hierarchising and sanctifying effects of the development discourse. First, it presents this discourse using secondary sources and then it applies critical discourse analysis to several texts and interviews to analyse whether the Slovak non-governmental development organization (NGDO) the Pontis Foundation follows the development discourse in terms of sanctifying development and hierarchising cultures. The analysis thus adds to the agency/structure discussion by analysing one actor in relation to the discourse. It also adds empirical results to the already existing critique expressed in regard to NGOs and their lack of partnership. Whereas the analysed texts are very much in accordance with the hierarchising discourse, in the interviews the respondents avoid hierarchisation and hierarchise cultures only after direct questions have been asked or when adhering to linearity in relation to South Korea. The respondents both reject and accept the term ‘development’ and blame its usage on external material and discursive pressure.

Keywords:

• development
• discourse
• Pontis Foundation
• new donors
• NGOs

Notes on contributor

Tomáš Profant is a research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague and a Ph.D. candidate at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work, Graduate School of Socio-Ecological Research for Development, University of Kassel. His research interest includes IPE, North–South relations, post-development and postcolonial theory, and discourse analysis. In his research he compares development discourses in Austria and Slovakia.

Notes

¹This study is part of a larger research for my Ph.D. thesis that compares Austrian and Slovak development discourses.

²The name of the author of the text was not mentioned on the website. According to one of the respondents, however, it was written by Roman Baranovič from Microsoft Slovakia, who also took part in the project, and it was then edited by the respondent and the PR manager of the Pontis Foundation.

³The gist of the story is in sentences 20–22 of the article:

Before the Slovaks came to Kenya, teachers at Rukanga did not know how to work with it [Power Point], however after only three days of the training, they were able to create their own presentation of a very good quality …On Wednesday they saw Power Point for the first time and already on Saturday they had a presentation about the school ready for the parents that lasted almost six hours.

⁴There are only four employees at Pontis who actually deal with ‘development’ cooperation in a substantial way.

⁵This is significant as it may weaken the resulting claim. There is a difference in answering the first question by saying ‘Kenya is a developing country’ and responding with ‘Yes, I agree that it is a developing country to the second one’. On the other hand, the respondents often work and talk in the context of ‘development’ cooperation, which an open question does not create. Thus, posing a very open question prevents the usual context of ‘development’ cooperation from influencing the answer, and this is problematic as well.

⁶To avoid extensive use of inverted commas, the terms ‘we’, ‘us', ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘our’ and ‘their’ are used here without the commas and refer to the two groups in the text.

⁷When no source is given for a quote in the text, it means that the quote is from the analysed article (Pontis, 2010c).

⁸For example, ‘Ms. Kontúrová and two other teachers will in few months go to Kenya to train their Kenyan colleagues about how to use ICT when teaching their students’ (Pontis, 2010b).

⁹Another respondent said that Kenya is a developing country ‘because someone called it that [ … ] if there is a GDP per capita definition and they belong on the [low income country] level, then according to this definition, it is a developing country’ (Interview No. 2, 2013). However, this respondent was not content with the fact that countries get written off just because they are called developing countries.

¹⁰There are two points to be mentioned here. First, circumstances can make this a rational strategy. Second, there indeed might be a different time concept that lacks a future in Africa, as John S. Mbiti claims, and thus a critique of it may contradict the partnership discourse. However, time conceptions of the future have been found in several African languages (Eriksson Baaz, 2005, p. 98).

¹¹In the discussion after the respondents went through the text, the respondent who said this specified that by the ‘true sense’, she meant the sense in which the term would be understood by the Tunisians – the usual hierarchical sense – and claimed that she would never use it in this way.