Politics of development
Section outline
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Politics of Development
Master 1
2025-2026
Teacher: Florence Brisset-Foucault
Florence.brisset-foucault@univ-paris1.fr
(credit image: Bodys Isek Kingelez, La Ville Fantôme)
This course aims at familiarising students with critical approaches to development. Articulating the sociology of public action and the history and anthropology of development, it does not seek to assess development plans’ efficiency or to provide ‘solutions’ to particular ‘problems’. It aims, instead, at reaching a better understanding of the ways in which the definition of both problems and solutions reflect transnational and local relations of power, as well as socially situated forms of knowledge. We will study the ways in which ‘development’ projects are concretely conceived, set up, and how they are received, understood and appropriated by their ‘beneficiairies’.
The course is organized in 12 sessions of 2 hours each. The work is based on readings, their critique, and the analysis of case studies.
Students are not expected to be already fluent in English and will not be assessed on their mastery of the language. However: everyone is expected to take this opportunity to practice their written and oral skills. My role will be to help you process and formulate your thinking in English, diversify your vocabulary, and hopefully feel more confident when taking the floor. I will also take particular care in making sure there is a balance between students’ levels of participation. The level of involvement in the discussions will be part of the evaluation (20% of the mark). We are all here to learn together.
Students have to carefully and critically read one text per week, starting week 2. Each week, you will prepare a one page manuscript essay on the text. I will collect randomly some of them (30% of the mark). You are expected to acquire an intimate knowledge of the text, situate the approach, assess its strengths and weaknesses and engage in a critical debate with the author and other members of the class. The texts are also here to help you in your own work (see below).
The sessions are organized around the discussion of the text, and then the discussion of the work of students on a development project, on which they will reflect all along the semester. Students will work in pairs or trios (depending on the number of people attending the class). Each team will send a 5-pages essay on the project of their choosing no later than 5.01 (50% of the mark). The methodology of the note will be explained during class.
Instructions on length and format:
3000 WORDS OR 20 000 CHARACTERS (SPACES INCLUDED) MAXIMUM FOR TEAMS OF THREE + 20 % PER ADDITIONAL TEAM MEMBER.
This does not include the list of references but does include footnotes
Please make paragraphs and section titles
PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAMES IN THE FILE NAMES AND IN THE DOCUMENT ITSELF. PLEASE SEND AS A WORD DOC NOT PDF
IMPORTANT: please do NOT send by email but upload on the EPI !!!!
Students can find an example of a very good critical essay from last year below.
Teams can pick a project in the list below:
The Groundnut scheme in Tanganyika/Tanzania
The Lake Turkana windfarm (Kenya)
The Great Green Wall initiative (Sahel)
The LAPSSET Corridor Program (Kenya-Ethiopia) (or other ‘corridors of development’ projects)
The East African Crude Oil Pipeline Project (EACOP)
The fight against sleeping sickness in Cameroun (or elsewhere)
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (or another dam in Africa or the Middle East, for instance the Aswan Dam in Egypt)
The imagination of the Sahel
Urban planning in colonial Casablanca
The malaria vaccine
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) initiative (on HIV/Aids)
Vision City, Kigali (Rwanda)
Radio as a ‘tool for development’
Plumpy’Nut and the fight against acute malnutrition
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The “pathway” for the critical essay
Objective: unpack A MULTI-LAYERED, THICK PROCESS
Attention: YOU OBVIOUSLY YOU WON’T HAVE TIME TO DO ALL THIS IN YOUR ESSAYS. HOWEVER THIS IS THE KIND OF QUESTIONS YOU HAVE TO ASK YOURSELF BEFORE MAKING A CHOICE ON PARTICULAR ASPECTS YOU WOULD LIKE TO TACKLE IN YOUR WORK
The social and intellectual origins of the “project”
The ways in which an “issue”, a “threat” and a “crisis” have been identified, and at the basis of the definition of a “need” to intervene. “Crisis” are not natural and not all are addressed. This reflects power relations, and/or the evolution of societies. THEY DO NOT REFLECT AN OBJECTIVE INTENSITY OF THE PROBLEM.
How are situations qualified?
Were there mobilisations of particular categories of population to ATTRACT development/intervention? How did they mobilise?
How was the “issue” measured and known? Statistics and numbers are not autonomous from politics. They reflect socio-political process AND are USED in narratives, especially success stories. Cf. Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers. How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It, (Cornell University Press, 2013) and Cf. Joel Glassman, Humanitarianism and the Quantification of the Human Needs (Routledge Humanitarian Press, 2019).
Who and/or what is made RESPONSIBLE of the project? Why?
How was the decision made?
FOLLOW THE MONEY! Who are the funders?
Who were/are the actors involved in the elaboration: private, public, international (private and public): what power relations between them? What are the SOCIAL CONDITIONS of these alliances/partnerships?
Be particularly attentive to the power relations between internal and external actors: cf. mobilisation of the notion of “extroversion” by JF Bayart “think dependency without being dependentists”: ‘L'Afrique dans le monde : une histoire d'extraversion’, Critique internationale, 1999/4 n° 5, 1999. p.97-120.
What were the initial plans (blueprints)?
Unpack the “buzzwords” of development (Andrea Cornwall) or what Ferguson calls “devspeak” and “devthink”, “jargon”: denaturalize them, origins of terminology, transformations, appropriations. Cornwall, Andrea. “Buzzwords and Fuzzwords: Deconstructing Development Discourse.” Development in Practice, vol. 17, no. 4/5, 2007, pp. 471–84.
To what extent are the projects path dependent? Or to what extent ruptures with what has been done before?
The political context of the decision and possibly the changes (regime change? Decolonisation?)
History of the State
THE LOCAL POLITICS: WHERE (was the dam built?) + local history of the presence of the State (differs according to regions within a country)
The setting up / implementation: by whom?
Effects on local power configurations: political (formation of the State) and social (relations between social classes/groups/races/gender)
Reception by “beneficiaries” or “recipients”: local interpretations/understandings, rejections, appropriations + WHO rejects? What do they do to reject?
IMPORTANT INSTRUCTION: even if you obviously can talk about it, try to take a step back from an assessment of the ‘success’ of the programme: THIS IS NOT WHAT I’M ASKING. WHAT I’M ASKING (THE COMMON “PROBLEMATIQUE” THAT YOU WILL ALL SHARE) : How does this particular project reflect and affect social hierarchies/power relations?
You can assess this at different levels: local, international, national. Go beyond the planners’ intentions
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- Presentation of the syllabus and the general approach
- Organisation of the work
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MANDATORY READING: James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine. « Development », Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, University Minnesota Press, 1994, chapter 9.
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MANDATORY READING: Fred Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans and the Development Concept”, in F. Cooper and R. Packard, Development and the Social Sciences. Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1997, p. 62-92.
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MANDATORY READING: Walter Rodney, How Europe underdeveloped Africa, Chapter 1.
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MANDATORY READING: Thandika Mkandawire, “Aid, Accountability, and Democracy in Africa.” Social Research 77, no. 4 (2010): 1149–82.
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MANDATORY READING: Graham Harrison, « Post-conditionality politics and administrative reform: Reflections on the cases of Uganda and Tanzania », Development and Change, 32 (4), 2001, p. 657-679.
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MANDATORY READING: Duffield Mark, « Risk-Management and the Fortified Aid Compound: Everyday Life in Post-Interventionary Society », Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2010, vol. 4, no 4, p. 453‑74.
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MANDATORY READING: Rama Salla Dieng, ‘Adversely Incorporated yet Moving up the Social Ladder?’: Labour Migrants Shifting the Gaze from Agricultural Investment Chains to ‘Care Chains’ in Capitalist Social Reproduction in Senegal. Africa Development. 47, 3 (Nov. 2022), 133–166.
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MANDATORY READING: Ruth Prince Ruth, 'Tarmacking' in the Millenium city: spatial and temporal trajectories of empowerment and development in Kisumu, Kenya. Africa, 83 (4), 2013, pp. 582-605.
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MANDATORY READING: Planel, Sabine. 2014. “A View of a Bureaucratic Developmental State: Local Governance and Agricultural Extension in Rural Ethiopia.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8 (3): 420–37.
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Boone, Catherine. “LAND REGIMES AND THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICS: PATTERNS OF LAND-RELATED CONFLICT.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 83, no. 1, 2013, pp. 188–203.
Manji Ambreena, 2006, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa. From Communal Tenure to Free Markets, London, Zed Books, 149p.
Poudiougou, Ibrahima and Giovanni Zanoletti. « Fabriquer l’identité à la pointe de la kalache : Violence et question foncière au Mali ». Revue internationale des études du développement, 2020/3 N° 243, 2020. p.37-65 and more generally special issue by JP Chauveau and Jacobo Grajales, « Introduction : foncier et violences politiques en Afrique : Pour une approche continuiste et processuelle ». Revue internationale des études du développement, 2020/3 N° 243, 2020. p.7-35.
Chauveau, Jean-Pierre and Paul Richards, « Les racines agraires des insurrections ouest-africaines : Une comparaison Côte d'Ivoire-Sierra Leone ». Politique africaine, 2008/3 N° 111, 2008. p.131-167.
Médard, Claire and Stéphanie Duvail, « Accaparement foncier et officialisation de la propriété privée au Kenya ». Hérodote, 2020/4 N° 179, 2020. p.165-181.
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MANDATORY READING: Debos, Marielle. 2021. “Biometrics and the Disciplining of Democracy: Technology, Electoral Politics, and Liberal Interventionism in Chad.” Democratization 28 (8): 1406–22.
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