Cultivating model developing citizens: exposing the grassroots to the MDGs

Abstract

Research about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has tended to view them through the lens of policy-makers and development practitioners. Ignored is the question of how the people who are the ‘targets’ of development programmes – the poor and marginalized – experience the MDGs. Based on ethnographic research of a local non-government development organization (NGDO) in North India, I use the example of a village meeting to explore how policy formulated to achieve the MDGs at the central and state level is communicated to the local level. These interactions illustrate how local NGDOs attempt to cultivate ‘model developing citizens’, enrolling the poor into regimes of governmentality, in which their bodies become the means through which global and national goals are achieved. Although not necessarily negative, these processes reveal how state accountability and responsibility for achieving the MDGs implies obligations on the poor that they are not always able or willing to fulfil.

Keywords:

• MDGs
• NGOs/NGDOs
• India
• governmentality
• grassroots

JEL classification:

• O19

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Salim Lakha at the University of Melbourne for organizing the panel on social protection at the 2009 ‘Meeting the MDGs’ Conference at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and for his useful comments on my paper. Further thanks goes to Laura Griffin at the University of Melbourne for her edit of an earlier draft. Finally, I am grateful for the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. The institutional field of the international aid chain is but one of a multitude of fields in which NGDO workers operate (see Jakimow 2010). Institutions in any given setting are multiple, though some will be more salient in particular decision-making and behaviour (Campbell 2004).

2. I use the term ‘poor’ in relation to people who self-identify or are identified by development agencies and to people who are poor by standard measures of well-being. I recognize that the ‘poor’ who are the targets and beneficiaries of development intervention may not be the poor by objective measures of poverty.

3. IVD targets all villagers for its development programmes, including the poor and the non-poor. In this case, underdevelopment is assigned to the villagers themselves, regardless of their economic and social status. I use ‘villagers’ to avoid the terms ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘clients’, both of which assume that the people targeted by IVD receive benefit or resources.

4. Discussions took place in Hindi, which I translated into English in my field notes.

5. The specific nature of the information the villagers provided displays considerable prior awareness of the scheme, in contrast to the fieldworker's assessment that the villagers knew very little.

6. I recognize and appreciate Chatterjee's (2004) distinction between populations and citizens, arguing that the latter obtains individual rights from the state, which is incompatible with the idea of welfare distributed among groups (populations) with differential entitlements. Nonetheless, I maintain the use of ‘citizen’, as in ‘model developing citizen’, to highlight the duties associated with rights and entitlements, whether obtained individually or as part of a group.

7. All rural families are entitled to job cards. The minimum wage for work means, however, that richer families will presumably not desire to participate and therefore self-select out. It is not uncommon for larger landowners to have job cards however, as they perceive there may be some benefit.

8. IVD neither promoted nor was involved in this scheme. To ensure anonymity, the author of this unpublished brochure remains unidentified here.

9. Although the TSC programme has succeeded in terms of the number of latrines constructed, anecdotal evidence suggests that these have not always been appropriate to the conditions. In particular, the need to collect water for the pour-flush system makes toilets unpopular in areas where women must travel several kilometres to reach the nearest water source. In many instances, latrines are used as storage sheds.

10. In one example, an SC hamlet was being excluded from NREGA works. The NGDO assisted a CBO to use the Right to Information Act to find out what works had been done. They took their complaint to the DO, who censured the panchayat pradhan (who was upper caste) and insisted that he undertake work in the SC hamlet.