From the failures of anti-politics to the promise of cash transfer: James Ferguson and the development encounter

Conveners: Bengt G. Karlsson, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University and Staffan Löfving, Department of Social Anthropology and the Institute of Latin American Studies, Stockholm University

Contact: bengt.karlsson@socant.su.se

Arguing, in his new book, that cash transfers in social welfare programs in Southern Africa constitute a new and unexpectedly efficient politics of distribution, anthropologist James Ferguson is energizing the discussion on ‘development after 2015’. This is hardly surprising. His now legendary take on state bureaucracy as an effect of the failures of development sparked the post-development critique that emerged in the 1990s, and subsequent publications on labor, poverty, corporate power and the state have kept him firmly positioned on the main stage of scholarly debate.

A longer reading of Ferguson’s work reveals a commitment to defamiliarization and a suspicion that habitual thinking is not only concealing but also reproducing political order. Hence the importance of looking for ‘the political’ in unconventional ways, and in places not expected. This has meant, among other things, that Ferguson seems to have developed or even moved away from his own writings by the time their arguments have become the ‘habits’ of others.

This panel is concerned with James Ferguson’s contribution to the critical study of development interventions, past and present. Authors are encouraged to reflect on the role played by his work in their own scholarly engagements and on its relevance for different ways of linking the local and the global in the study of social change. We take the key of his contribution to be the insistence on the promise of the local example to challenge the work of universalisms such as ‘development’, ‘modernization’ and ‘neoliberalism’. His own geographical point of departure thus poses questions about the applicability of his approach to localities beyond Southern Africa. Contributors from all fields are welcome, but given James Ferguson’s disciplinary point of departure, we would especially call for papers on his relevance (or irrelevance) to development researchers outside of anthropology.

22 Aug., 16:00–17:30, Seminar Room Y23

• Unpacking the anti-politics of cash transfer: Latin American studies and the anthropology of James Ferguson, Staffan Löfving, Stockholm University.
• The function of Saami consultation processes in the governance of renewable energy development in Sweden. Annett Sasvari, Uppsala university.
• Seeing like a transnational state? Investigating Ferguson’s critique of Scott’s relevance in times of global capitalism. Linda Engström, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).
• From critiques of development interventions to the potentials of cash transfers – the similar trajectories of rural development debates and James Ferguson’s work. Stefan Granlund and Flora Hajdu, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

Abstracts

Unpacking the anti-politics of cash transfer: Latin American studies and the anthropology of James Ferguson. Staffan Löfving, Stockholm University.

Pioneered by the work of James Ferguson, key strands in a now burgeoning social science literature on money work on diversifying the concept, construing it not merely as a technology of capital, conflict and inequality, but also as a social devise, creating opportunities for distribution, change and interaction. This paper is critically engaged with this “new” story. It takes the phenomenon of cash transfer in Central America as point of departure. Attached to a set of social and behavioural conditions, money in such programs emerge as a gift that requires a return and to many without land and employment, behaviour and sociality belong to the few things left to trade. The centre of the analysis are poor households at the margins of the growing cities of Central America where programs of cash transfer operate, but to whom remittance is the dominant form of money transfer. Families also navigate a political and legal landscape of the drug trade and political corruption. In order to understand how choices of income strategies and for emplacement and sociality are made in these households, the paper takes the transfer of cash to include all the economic phenomena mentioned above: aid, remittances, drugs and corruption. In dialogue with an emerging critique in the crossdisciplinary field of Latin American Studies, the paper cautions against the alleged political promises of resource distribution through cash transfer. Such optimism rests on a sole focus on poverty and it neglects the often violent reality of forced or involuntary movement (the transfer as remittance), and the dynamics of insecurity and emplacement (the transfer in the drug trade and in politics).

The function of Saami consultation processes in the governance of renewable energy development in Sweden. Annett Sasvari, Uppsala university.

Recent large-scale expansion of wind power development in Sweden has systematically called upon green credentials to justify the appropriation of indigenous herding pastures for the development of the wind industry. This “green transformation” of landscapes has resulted in the restructuring of rule and authority in the access, use and management of resources, involving a variety of new market actors now responsible for the environmental decision making process. Drawing on ethnography from Jijnejaverie herding unit and their seven-year conflict with the wind industry, this paper will illustrate how indigenous rights and renewable energy development goals are negotiated in the land-use permit application process. Specifically, it will show how Saami claims are articulated, interpreted and then materialized or erased in so called consultation arrangements (sw. samrådsprocesser). These examples will illustrate that even though Saami reindeer herders’ participation in the consultation requirement has been increasingly requested as the appropriate approach to land-use conflicts, these regulatory processes are based on vague legal and political guidelines that shifted the responsibility of evaluating risk, impact and land rights to the project proponents and thereby reinforced mechanisms that instead of guaranteeing influence, further marginalize Saami participants from the environmental decision-making process.

Seeing like a transnational state? Investigating Ferguson’s critique of Scott’s relevance in times of global capitalism. Linda Engström, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

In 2005, James Ferguson wrote the paper “Seeing like an oil company” where he criticizes James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” for not being relevant in times of increased neoliberal influence on state planning. Instead of homogenization and a uniform, gridlike development – which Scott is writing about - you end up with isolated enclaves, linked in networks, isolated from much of society, Ferguson argues. The fact that the state acts in a different way today, with a much weaker objective to include a broad social development in its political-economic logic, promotes this development of enclaves of privately secured assets (usable Africa) and hinterlands that are largely ignored – or weakly governed by the state (unusable Africa). Ferguson also argues that there is a different way of seeing, proper to the oil company rather than to the state, in modern planning, using the example of oil and other mineral extraction to make his case. This paper aims to challenge some of Ferguson’s claims, based on empirical material from a contemporary large scale agricultural investment on sugar cane in Tanzania. The investment receives support from donors, the government of Tanzania and national agricultural partnerships subject to substantial corporate influence. The investment provides problematizing insights about actors and their ‘way of seeing’, rationales and outcomes of contemporary development which links to the debate between Ferguson and Scott.

From critiques of development interventions to the potentials of cash transfers – the similar trajectories of rural development debates and James Ferguson’s work. Stefan Granlund and Flora Hajdu, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

From a rural development perspective, James Ferguson has been important for the debate ever since his critique of the development ‘machinery’ in 1990 up to his recent book on cash transfers. Policies for rural development and sustainable livelihoods in Africa have gone through a similar trajectory, starting with different agricultural development interventions, which Ferguson and others criticized for not being well attuned to local contexts, through the strong focus on small businesses and microfinance that also received heavy critique in the early 2000’s, to a more recent (and already highly criticized) focus on private large-scale investments and ‘business for development’. The realization that all development projects that try to prescribe specifically what needs to be done to reduce poverty tend to fail have led to an increased interest in direct cash transfers to poor people. They could then themselves decide how best to use the money, which also would serve as an insurance against sudden events that erode livelihoods and assets. Opinions currently differ however on whether cash transfers are able to produce long-term livelihood effects that can help reduce poverty. Our new research project aims to investigate this through exploring the effects of 14 years of Child Support Grants (CSG) on broader livelihoods and productive assets in two poor rural communities in South Africa. Arguing that cash transfers go to the root of a distributive problem rather than just treating the ‘symptoms’ of poverty, Ferguson argues for a Basic Income Grant (BIG) – which our project also aims to address.