The Afterlives of Development Interventions in Eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique)

Introduction

International development involves ideologies and activities ostensibly directed towards the improvement of the well-being of populations in the Global South. Mainstream development interventions emphasize forward-looking ideas of progress and advocate for novelty. In so doing, however, the sector is often myopic, as evidenced by countless unintended consequences that stretch beyond interventions' official life cycle.

Consequences of Interventions

Whether deemed success or failure, such interventions leave behind a long trail of tangible and intangible traces.

Project Overview

Project AfDevLives explores how development interventions' representational and material remains are experienced, employed, and re-appropriated by local actors over time, and how such active immanence of the past affects people's life-worlds. It weaves together three temporal gazes:

1. Prospective (development's blueprints)
2. Retrospective (sediments of the past, shorthanded as interventions' 'afterlives')
3. Present-time lived experience

Methodological Framework

Consciously de-centering formal development discourse and temporalities, the project develops and applies a phenomenological framework oriented around embodiment and the intertwinement of people, objects, and space.

Research Approach

Using an interdisciplinary approach centered on social anthropology, research will be conducted in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, neighboring Eastern African countries that are among the highest recipients of development aid and whose past and present balance continuities and ruptures.

Work Packages

The project will unfold via an iterative process involving four complementary work packages:

1. Movement
2. Image
3. Storytelling
4. Synthesis

Objectives

Working across work packages, countries, and case studies, the project will pursue three categories of objectives:

1. Conceptual (methodological toolkit)
2. Empirical (based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork)
3. Practical (aimed at the development sector, local heirs of interventions, and the public at large)

Expected Outcomes

The project will result in a robust set of outputs.