The ‘red cover’ version accepted economic
growth as the engine of poverty reduction but
attached enormous weight and significance to
‘empowerment, security and opportunity’. A
ferocious debate ensued. Kanbur conceded to
certain changes, but in the course of a May 2000
Bank meeting, in which US Treasury pressure
was coupled with strong lobbying from powerful
Bank economists (including sympathy for the
‘growth first’ position expressed by Bank
President James Wolfenson), the rift between
those defending the red cover version and the
pro-growth faction deepened. Kanbur, realizing
that the entire report was deeply vulnerable,
promptly resigned. The final published version
actually retained much of the thrust of the origi-
nal draft, suggesting in some quarters a sort of
victory for the Kanbur group.
What is one to make of this tale of intrigue,
knowledge and ‘discursive contestation’ at 1818 H
Street in Washington, DC? Any answer to this
question would rest on some sort of institutional
ethnography, that is to say applying the ethno-
grapher’s lens to the development institutions
themselves (see Herbert, 2000). Ferguson’s (1990)
was the first attempt at an ethnography of the
ways in which development problems are con-
strued and represented – typically, he discovered,
by rendering social conflicts as technical,
‘depoliticized’ problems; development was an
‘anti-politics machine’. Yet much of this early
work in attacking the development business as a
sort of failed modernity was empirically weakest
where it seemed theoretically strongest: it rested
not on careful institutional ethnographies, or on
discursive analysis of economic development as
a profession or practice, or indeed on the careful
reconstruction of how ideas develop and travel,
but rather on poorly substantiated claims about
purportedly all-powerful development institu-
tions. All of this had the perhaps unintended
effect of endorsing the supposedly unassailable
powers of the development project itself.
Ferguson’s work also seem to run against the
intuitive grain by suggesting that development
projects were implemented without politics,
when evidence abounded that development was
generative of struggle (Schroeder, 1999) – a
hyperpolitics machine!
New work has turned the cultural lens on
development institutions and practices, and on
resistance movements, by providing a deeper,
thicker sort of ethnography (see Burawoy et al.,
1995; 2000). Moore (2001) has examined multi-
lateral agencies in semi-arid West Africa with an
eye to the production of authoritative develop-
ment and knowledge, and she does this as a sort
of participant observer in a wholly understudiedpart of the development world, namely the
global development consultant. Moore raises a
panoply of important issues that shuttle
between the politics of Burkina Faso and the
upper echelons of CILSS and the Paris Club.
Her starting point is the ‘high modernism’
(Scott, 1998) of the Sankara regime, which
attempts to construct a new order on the backs
of African ‘decentralized despotism’. The
result is a vast Ptemkin village in which nearly
all the claims of animation and revolutionary
practice are fraudulent; its legacy in Burkina
is one part surrealism and one part high comedy,
or perhaps farce (the governor’s TV monitor),
what Mbembe (1992) has called the ‘banality of
the postcolony’. Moore is concerned to show,
however, that the Burkina government is
especially adept at responding to the latest
global development discourse by cooking up
projects to acquire Official Development Assis-
tance (ODA) monies: it might be community
development, it might be decentralization, but
either way the state is skilled at reworking
discourses and texts to gain access to global
development resources through the World Bank,
USAID or CILSS. As Moore says, ‘the repro-
duction of a donor way of thinking about develop-
mentoccurs very quickly’ (2001: 171). In the
Burkina case it is to be recalled that 20 per cent
of GDP is derived from ODA (this is larger than
all state current and capital expenditures com-
bined, and more than all government consump-
tion!) and hence there is a larger political
dynamic at work – what Castells (1998) tren-
chantly calls the ‘political economy of begging’ –
on which the discursive creativity (and fictions)
of working over the foreign assistance establish-
ment are predicated.
As the product of a consultant around one
set of development interventions – the national
resource management program – Moore’s work
raises some key questions. Neither the state oper-
atives nor multilateral agents believe anyof the
public claims about compliance and accountabil-
ity. In other words, a part of her concern with
conditionality is actually a sort of ‘public secret’:
everyone knows this is nonsense, but they all
pretend otherwise. How does such a public secret
operate, in what arenas can it take hold, what are
its limits, and how can it be challenged precisely
by some of the conditionalities that Moore seeks
to document? Goldman’s (2001) analysis of the
World Bank explores these conundrums further
by posing the question: how is a development
institution ‘greened’? He focuses on dams, one
of the most controversial of Bank activities.
Dams and resettlement have of course projected
the Bank into a highly contested area, in which444 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 444