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Abstract
During the last decade new actors such as migrant organisations, schools and private development initiatives have emerged as a ‘fourth pillar’ of development cooperation. The rise of this ‘pillar’ is often primarily conceptualised and explained within a ‘Western’ social and cultural context. However, development initiatives within diasporas may often be embedded within distinct transnational social systems and rooted in embodied cultural knowledge. Hence, there may be a need to regard diaspora-driven development aid differently from other ‘fourth pillar’ aid initiatives. This article focuses on the changing role of the Tamil diaspora in development projects in Sri Lanka. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, inside knowledge about the diaspora through long-time political engagement in Tamil organisations, as well as interviews and focus groups with Tamils in Norway, we discuss how social and political processes in both the home and host country may have an impact on diaspora networks, remittance practices and the constitution of diaspora-driven development aid. We connect migration practices and development projects in the homeland and argue that we need to acknowledge the importance of shifting political, social, economic and cultural contexts in our attempts to understand the culturally meaningful ways in which diaspora members channel their development efforts and contribute to the constitution of the ‘fourth pillar’ of development.
Notes on contributors
Eugene Guribye, PhD, is a Senior Researcher and Head of Innovation in the Public Sector at Agder Research in Kristiansand, Norway. His research has largely focused on refugees, social networks and the civil society.
Sarvendra Tharmalingam, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. His research has largely focused on remittance practices among refugees.
Notes
1 One of the authors has a long history of engagement as a member and occasionally leader of various Tamil organisations.
2 The Tamil Co-coordinating Committee was first formed in Paris as an independent organisation in the late 1970s. Later it became the leading organisation that led the LTTE-supporting network in France. This name was adopted in other counties too and TCC became a trade name for the LTTE-supporting network. TCCs were also considered to be LTTE branches.
3 A poetic version of this rhetoric reads in Tamil: ‘Engal nilathil, engal palathil thanki nitpoom naangal’ (We shall stay firm on our own land and our own strength).
7 In Tamil, the contribution was named Theddam, meaning ‘saving’.