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Volume 12 Number 5
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Editorial
If language both shapes and expresses thought, so the terminology and jargon of development have an effect not only on how the issues are conceptualised, but also on the policies and actions that flow from that understanding. Given the complexities being confronted, there is almost bound to be a gap between rhetoric and practice. But there is nevertheless a real difference, for instance, between referring to those on the receiving end of development assistance as beneficiaries or counterparts, as clients or partners, as grantees or project-holders, or as end-users or participants. The term adopted signals something about how the agency using them views its own development mission. Likewise, the terms used to describe the relationship between a donor agency and the organisations it supports financially will vary, depending on the observer’s perspective. NGO funding agencies may very well refer to such organisations as their ‘partners’, while the latter are more likely to think of their benefactors simply as ‘donors’ rather than ‘partners’, and not necessarily distinguish them from official aid agencies. And most development workers have witnessed or perhaps experienced situations in which a donor agency honestly believes it has developed a shared agenda with its local counterparts, while the latter feel that they were not in fact invited to do more than respond to an agenda that had been set by others.
Two papers in this issue of Development in Practice explicitly explore some of the ways in which policy and practice are shaped by language. Jihad Makhoul and Lindsey Harrison show very clearly how local power-brokers in rural Lebanon are able to consolidate their material and political power through their ability to speak ‘development-ese’ and how, by extension, they manipulate development assistance in ways that further exclude the marginalised. Matthew Clarke looks at what he calls ‘three generations’ of work on HIV/ AIDS in Thailand, tracing how successive metaphors and terminology have been associated with quite different understandings of the issues and approaches to the problems. The move from ‘victims of AIDS’ to ‘people living with AIDS’ to ‘people affected by AIDS’ is a move from seeing patients as ‘targets’ in isolation, to seeing them and their condition as necessarily part of a wider community.
Similar issues are raised in the case study by Fiona Leach and Shashikala Sitaram on a programme in India that sought, as so many others have done, to empower women through the provision of microfinance—in this case for a silk-reeling enterprise. One of their findings was that by defining itself as a women’s empowerment project, and thereby focusing exclusively on women, the programme failed to involve men in a positive way, or to consider how male relatives might sabotage the activities if they felt undermined by them. Rebecca M. Vonderlack and Mark Schreiner look at some of the practical options for providing microfinance services for women in ways that avoid such negative outcomes, building on mechanisms that women already use. Drawing on a study of household enterprises in Bolivia, Robyn Eversole also demonstrates that what she calls the ‘balancing act’ between business and household may represent a flexible strategy that takes into account both financial and nonfinancial goals and not sloppy management, as micro-enterprise development agencies often maintain. All three of these papers show how easily the concepts and language of development can end up not merely over-simplifying the issues but also fostering the sense that if reality does not conform to what is supposed to happen, then the problem is not that the analysis is weak, but that people are somehow not getting it right. If the underpinning analysis as well as the implementation of development activities were ‘bottom up’, then perhaps the gap between the two might begin to close.
Deborah Eade
Oxfam GB
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