Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AfDevLives (The Afterlives of Development Interventions in Eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique))
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-09-01 al 2025-02-28
International development involves ideologies and activities ostensibly directed towards the improvement of 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. Whether deemed success or failure, such interventions leave behind a long trail of tangible and intangible traces.
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: prospective (development's blueprints and formal objectives); retrospective (sediments of the past, shorthanded as 'afterlives'); and present-time lived experience. Consciously de-centering formal development discourse and temporalities, the project develops and applies a phenomenological framework oriented around embodiment and intertwinement of people, objects, and space.
Using an interdisciplinary approach centered on social anthropology, research is conducted in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, neighbouring Eastern African countries that are among the highest recipients of development aid and whose past and present balance continuities and ruptures. The project unfolds via an iterative process involving four complementary work packages: Movement, Image, Storytelling, and Synthesis. Working across work packages, countries, and case studies, the project pursues three categories of objectives: conceptual (methodological toolkit), empirical (based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork), and practical (aimed at the development sector, local heirs of interventions, and the public at large). The project results in a robust set of outputs.
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: prospective (development's blueprints and formal objectives); retrospective (sediments of the past, shorthanded as 'afterlives'); and present-time lived experience. Consciously de-centering formal development discourse and temporalities, the project develops and applies a phenomenological framework oriented around embodiment and intertwinement of people, objects, and space.
Using an interdisciplinary approach centered on social anthropology, research is conducted in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, neighbouring Eastern African countries that are among the highest recipients of development aid and whose past and present balance continuities and ruptures. The project unfolds via an iterative process involving four complementary work packages: Movement, Image, Storytelling, and Synthesis. Working across work packages, countries, and case studies, the project pursues three categories of objectives: conceptual (methodological toolkit), empirical (based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork), and practical (aimed at the development sector, local heirs of interventions, and the public at large). The project results in a robust set of outputs.
As an ethnographic, bottom-up project, AfDevLives is primarily built around individual case studies. The first two years of research included two rounds of fieldwork (on average, three months of fieldwork per researcher per year). The following cases have been identified:
• The afterlives of a Finnish-Kenyan water project in western Kenya
• The remains of a colonial/state-led agricultural farm in southern Mozambique
• The legacies of cashew processing factories in south-east Tanzania
• Infrastructural and industrial remains involving the Kenyan railway in central Kenya
• Remains of health-related development projects’ vehicles across Mozambique
• The afterlives of a cotton factory facility in northern Tanzania
• Creative tracing using audiovisual methods in urban and peri-urban Kenya
• The legacies of a textile factory in central Mozambique
In terms of methods, the project’s first two years explored the intuitive appeal of walking as symbolic and affective, drawing on a host of methods that combine movement with interviews and charging them with phenomenological epistemologies. Such methods involve accompanying local guides in response to an open prompt, “where is/was development?”. Through such phrasing—“where” rather than “what”—we seek the concrete, the spatially anchored, and the multiple. Emphasizing embodied tracing helps to evoke subtle memories concerning development’s multiple layers and to locate the bygone in relation to the contemporary. We then supplement walking with creative methods such as drawing, photography, and audio.
Integral to the research are participatory activities and academic collaborations, notably in the form of workshops involving advanced and junior scholars from both the North and the South. For example, in mid-2023, AfDevLives organized a qualitative research workshop using a collective ethnographic method known as ECRIS. The event took place in three locations in Kenya and involved 28 participants including competitively selected participants from across Eastern Africa. The workshop traced the remains of a large-scale Finnish-Kenyan water project in western Kenya (1980s-1990s), and built on months of research in archives in Finland and in Kenya, field visits, and a series of interviews in Finland. Several more workshops are planned for the coming years.
AfDevLives currently has several publications projects either in submission or in advanced stages of preparation.
• The afterlives of a Finnish-Kenyan water project in western Kenya
• The remains of a colonial/state-led agricultural farm in southern Mozambique
• The legacies of cashew processing factories in south-east Tanzania
• Infrastructural and industrial remains involving the Kenyan railway in central Kenya
• Remains of health-related development projects’ vehicles across Mozambique
• The afterlives of a cotton factory facility in northern Tanzania
• Creative tracing using audiovisual methods in urban and peri-urban Kenya
• The legacies of a textile factory in central Mozambique
In terms of methods, the project’s first two years explored the intuitive appeal of walking as symbolic and affective, drawing on a host of methods that combine movement with interviews and charging them with phenomenological epistemologies. Such methods involve accompanying local guides in response to an open prompt, “where is/was development?”. Through such phrasing—“where” rather than “what”—we seek the concrete, the spatially anchored, and the multiple. Emphasizing embodied tracing helps to evoke subtle memories concerning development’s multiple layers and to locate the bygone in relation to the contemporary. We then supplement walking with creative methods such as drawing, photography, and audio.
Integral to the research are participatory activities and academic collaborations, notably in the form of workshops involving advanced and junior scholars from both the North and the South. For example, in mid-2023, AfDevLives organized a qualitative research workshop using a collective ethnographic method known as ECRIS. The event took place in three locations in Kenya and involved 28 participants including competitively selected participants from across Eastern Africa. The workshop traced the remains of a large-scale Finnish-Kenyan water project in western Kenya (1980s-1990s), and built on months of research in archives in Finland and in Kenya, field visits, and a series of interviews in Finland. Several more workshops are planned for the coming years.
AfDevLives currently has several publications projects either in submission or in advanced stages of preparation.
While it is still early, at this interim stage, to share unequivocal results, it is clear that the project’s key hypothesis, whereby the afterlives of development interventions continue to ‘haunt’ local populations and command great—if varying, even conflicting—significance, is established. Indeed, the idea has been both reinforced and refined through multiple rounds of ethnographic research and through workshops, publication projects, and other team activities. In particular, three areas can be highlighted for the development of promising new scholarly horizons:
First, the project pushes for methodological innovations that draw on phenomenological inspiration, creative methods, and critical participatory literature to bear on the study of the afterlives of development interventions. One emerging area of prominence involves the use of audio walks, in which pre-recorded audio is played while crossing an ambulatory trajectory, allowing for immersive, unexpected, and dissonance-filled ways of experiencing a place. Such walks involve embodied, affective engagement that loosens the boundaries between past and present and allows for intimate explorations of the tensions between "then" and "now." Several audio-related activities are planned for the coming years, focusing on methods, knowledge production, elicitation, and dissemination.
Second, the project is currently exploring the project-based learning potential of evoking North-South academic partnerships around the dried-up waterbeds of bygone bilateral development interventions and their long-term legacies. Such direction would take the form of an open-ended, lab-like co-learning process of joint experimentation and discovery around the multi-faceted traces and legacies of a single bygone development intervention involving both countries. This line of collaboration holds potential for understanding the many trajectories of the afterlives of development interventions, for advancing a daring conversation about long-term ties and responsibilities, and for drawing lessons for improving planning and evaluation in the context of North-South partnerships.
Lastly, in thematic terms, the project increasingly sheds light on the underexplored topic of industrialization in Africa. Industrialization long encapsulated ideas about African development, sovereignty, and economic freedom, and the image of the thriving African factory once mobilized a strive for self-sufficiency, productive diversification, and economic resilience. However, following the debt crises and the SAPs of the 1980s, today the continent accounts for merely 2% of the world’s industrial manufacturing. There are signs of genuine interest across the continent in industrial reinvigoration, yet the topic is under-researched. Four of AfDevLives’ team members work on topics related to deindustrialization/reindustrialization, and the project is developing collaborations to further pursue this line of inquiry.
First, the project pushes for methodological innovations that draw on phenomenological inspiration, creative methods, and critical participatory literature to bear on the study of the afterlives of development interventions. One emerging area of prominence involves the use of audio walks, in which pre-recorded audio is played while crossing an ambulatory trajectory, allowing for immersive, unexpected, and dissonance-filled ways of experiencing a place. Such walks involve embodied, affective engagement that loosens the boundaries between past and present and allows for intimate explorations of the tensions between "then" and "now." Several audio-related activities are planned for the coming years, focusing on methods, knowledge production, elicitation, and dissemination.
Second, the project is currently exploring the project-based learning potential of evoking North-South academic partnerships around the dried-up waterbeds of bygone bilateral development interventions and their long-term legacies. Such direction would take the form of an open-ended, lab-like co-learning process of joint experimentation and discovery around the multi-faceted traces and legacies of a single bygone development intervention involving both countries. This line of collaboration holds potential for understanding the many trajectories of the afterlives of development interventions, for advancing a daring conversation about long-term ties and responsibilities, and for drawing lessons for improving planning and evaluation in the context of North-South partnerships.
Lastly, in thematic terms, the project increasingly sheds light on the underexplored topic of industrialization in Africa. Industrialization long encapsulated ideas about African development, sovereignty, and economic freedom, and the image of the thriving African factory once mobilized a strive for self-sufficiency, productive diversification, and economic resilience. However, following the debt crises and the SAPs of the 1980s, today the continent accounts for merely 2% of the world’s industrial manufacturing. There are signs of genuine interest across the continent in industrial reinvigoration, yet the topic is under-researched. Four of AfDevLives’ team members work on topics related to deindustrialization/reindustrialization, and the project is developing collaborations to further pursue this line of inquiry.