The Paternalism of Partnership: A Postcolonial Reading of Identity in Development Aid

by Maria Eriksson Baaz

The development industry has been criticized recently from very diverse quarters. This book is a nuanced and original investigation of Northern donor agency personnel as they deliver aid in Tanzania. The author explores in particular how donor identities are manifested in the practices of development aid, and how calls for equal partnership between North and South are often very different in practice. She demonstrates the conflicts and tensions in the development aid process. These reflect both the longstanding critique of the Eurocentric nature of development, and discourse that still assumes images of the superior, initiating, efficient 'donor' as opposed to the inadequate, passive, unreliable 'partner' or recipient.

This book will be useful to students seeking an introduction to postcolonial studies and the ways in which it can throw light on contemporary social realities, and to scholars interested in the ethnographic realities of aid delivery.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2005

Reviews

[Zawani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kritikan tajam dan pedas berkenaan proses pembangunan sosial dan ekonomi pasca kolonial di Tanzania, sebuah negara di benua Afrika daripada Maria Erikson Baaz, seorang pengkaji sejarah kolonial di negara-negara membangun. Tanzania yang pernah dijajah oleh tiga bangsa Eropah, Swedish (Orang Sweden), British (Orang Britain) dan Danes (Orang Denmark) sejak 1880-an sehingga 1961 kini masih bergelar negara membangun. Dan proses pembangunan di Tanzania kini masih bertulang-belakangkan sumber dana daripada ketiga-tiga negara penjajah tersebut yang kini bertopengkan imej NGO dan bukannya imej penjajah.

Dari sudut sosial di mana-mana negara yang pernah diduduki penjajah Eropah, masyarakatnya seringkali memandang tinggi akan bangsa yang berkulit putih ini. Ini termasuklah masyarakat Tanzania, yang menggelar penjajah Eropah sebagai ‘mzungu’, dan ‘mzungu’ ini diangkat-angkat oleh masyarakat bahawa mereka lebih pandai, lebih hebat dan lebih ‘superior’. Walhal, sikap dan watak manusia itu sama sahaja tanpa mengira bangsa dan kaum, mungkin sahaja masyarakat Tanzania tidak pernah melihat keburukan kelakuan orang Eropah seperti mabuk, bodoh, mementingkan diri sendiri dan sebagainya.

Namun perkara ini sangat mempengaruhi cara berfikir masyarakat Tanzania yang akhirnya diterjemahkan dalam bentuk menunduk pada kehendak-kehendak orang Eropah yang mengeksploit sumber tempatan melalui hubungan dua hala yang kononnya berbentuk ‘partnership’ pada pasca kolonial. Perkara ini sangat mempengaruhi perkembangan ekonomi di Tanzania yang kini sangat berkibalatkan ekonomi Eropah (Eurocentrism). Tanzania menjadi tidak mandiri dan hilang keupayaan untuk membangun ekonomi sendiri sehinggakan segala polisi ekonominya perlu dirujuk kepada Eropah. Hasil daripada ‘partnership’ ini Eropah yang mengaut untung, Tanzanian yang mengerah kudrat penat dan lelah.

Turut juga dibincangkan perihal perbezaan budaya antara budaya Eropah dan budaya Afrika yang mana kemasukan orang Eropah ke Tanzania sedikit sebanyak merubah budaya sedia ada di Afrika. Ini yang menjadi kunci utama kepada kajian Baaz, berkenaan identiti Tanzania yang semakin hari semakin samar hilang ditelan dan digantikan dengan budaya Eropah . Masyarakatnya berlumba-lumba mahu menjadi seperti Eropah; berkot, memakai tali leher, berkemeja. Dan proses penyingkiran budaya ini turut juga menimpa aliran sastera Tanzania. Sastera klasik Tanzania yang diajarkan di sekolah-sekolah beralih arah kepada sastera Eropah yang kebanyakannya meninggikan kehormatan orang Eropah.

Sebagai kesimpulannya, Baaz menyatakan bahawa wujud satu unsur ‘patern’ baru penjajahan pasca kolonial berbentuk ‘partnership’ di Tanzania. Jujurnya saya mengambil masa yang sangat lama untuk menghabiskan buku ini, sekitar tiga bulan. Kemungkinan kerana buku ini berat dengan fakta dan kajian terperinci, membuatkan saya mahu menghadaminya secara berperingkat tanpa meninggalkan mana-mana halaman. Bahasa Inggeris yang digunakan juga tidaklah terlalu tinggi untuk difahami dan yang tinggi hanyalah sekadar beberapa terma sosiologi dan ekonomi. Karya kajian akademik ini sangat saya sarankan bagi mereka yang ingin mengkaji tentang perkembangan pasca kolonial di Afrika.

[Sara-Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was important to me in reinforcing the idea that development has internalized outsider indictments of the enterprise. Self-critique has, in some sense, altered the terrain at the discursive level, and from this a discourse of partnership emerged, with ideas like transparency and mutual trust tossed around as if donor and partner were intimate bedfellows. This burgeoning discourse, however, and this is important point, is nonetheless inconsistent (or consistent insofar as ‘transparency’ only emerges as a solution in response to a problem with transparency, the erring party of course being the wily Third World) with the ways in which identities continue to be forged by development workers. From interviews with Danish development workers in Tanzania, Baaz shows how ‘donors’ give meaning to their work through the reliance on a variety of ambivalent tropes, propagated since before the slave ships sailed and the bibles were disseminated: the Other is predictably passive, unreliable, lazy, incompetent and altogether inferior, while the self in turn, is basically good and honest, if at times a little gullible. These stereotypes emerge as a representational practice when meaning is uncertain and the donor is insecure. The development worker, desperate for a coping mechanism to make sense of economic inequalities in living conditions or to rectify the challenge of a particular understanding of whiteness, is all the more insecure with a partnership ethics as the formal guideline emphasizing something of a hands-off policy while the organizations, not to mention loved ones and ones own self-conception, expect that one ‘makes a difference’ and have the projects on ground, and tangible, as proof.

Baaz however considers it too simplistic too think of partnership discourse as empty rhetoric, and I agree. From her perspective, locating the contradiction between theory and practice relies on a ‘rationalist mainstream model of development intervention, according to which development interventions proceed smoothly from policy and implementations to outcomes’. What is missing is the conflicting, hybrid, interests of various actors that reinterpret and appropriate the process in ways that break with the colonial legacy in some sense. Baez’s exposition on these important fronts gets very murky as, ‘This questioning seldom involves ultimate rejection. It often involves instead a reversal whereby the legitimacy of development aid is reinstated’. She may have benefited from something like zizek’s/sloterdijk’s twist on ideology ‘we know what we do yet we still do it’, wherein critical (cynical) distance efficaciously permits one’s objective complicity. I hear this all the time from friends—‘I know teaching English abroad is problematic, but…[fill in excuse:].’ Although I would like to blame my compatriots, I cannot, I am more than implicated. Perhaps it is because of my own implication that I feel the need to critique Baez. If there is a contradiction between a discourse of partnership and one’s intersubjective identifications, how do these two sustain one another? It must be something more than mere hypocrisy if the contradiction doesn’t just dissolve once pointed out. This is deserving of much more analysis than Baaz’s book permits.

For Baaz, post-development--think Gustavo Esteva, Arturo Escobar, Vandana Shiva and the whole Development Dictionary crew—merely reverses the binaries inherited by the colonizer, by presenting the Third World as a ‘sign of positive difference to which Westerners should turn in search for salvation’ the myth of the noble savage is replicated, with all its romantic idealizations. Logically, I agree, poles indeed reverse, but this can only be said to be a mirror image process when abstracted from the context of power. For although we may live in something like a house of mirrors, we in the West might just benefit from seeing in the mirror something worthy of adoration other than our pale faces and empty eyes. Difference, frozen and reified as it's representations might be, doesn’t by necessity have to be placed in an evolutionary framework, as Baaz implies. I maintain, along with the post-development gang, that there is something important that difference can teach us, even if only that our purported sameness is a fissured vision.

Other divergences: I agree that it is dangerous to delegitimize ‘demands for economic development and equality’ by presenting them as ‘symptoms of a pathetic, dangerous Westernization’, rendering ‘demands for economic development and equality’ as ‘signs of a loss of authenticity’, but I do not think that the presentation of the non-western other as ‘lacking in hunger for profit and material goods’necessarily lead to blaming the Third World for its poverty. I think I am, along with Baaz, attempting to negotiate a divide between the trajectories of both postcolonial and development studies in which, quoting Christine Sylvester ‘development studies does not tend to listen to subalterns and postcolonial studies does not tend to concern itself with whether the subaltern is eating’.

The book, appropriately, ends with a quote from Spivak, calling for an engagement ‘in a persistent critique of what one cannot not want’.