Albany, NY : SUNY Press, 2015. xiii, 379 pp. (Tables, maps, illustrations.) US$90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-5783-3.
This book makes a highly original contribution to the small but growing anthropological literature on non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The primary aim of the book is to move beyond “the well-intentioned work of NGOs” (2) to consider instead what a focus on NGOs can tell us about how ordinary people experience development processes, and how these NGOs contribute to the construction of what the author calls the “development-scape” within a particular historical setting. Its focus is on the ethnographic study of Bangladesh as a country that has for many years been on the front line of both international development and NGO worlds.
The author suggests that we need to pay attention to NGOs in Bangladesh because they “are so closely intertwined with and involved in development that they are practically synonymous with the concept of development” (1). This leads Manzurul Mannan to develop a highly distinctive approach to the topic in which he seeks to highlight the hidden aspects of people’s lives that are affected and changed by NGO work. For example, he shows how NGO credit reduces women’s reliance on traditional social networks. Mannan is also concerned with investigating globalization and development through his analysis of the “development-scape” which seeks to show firstly how power operates through international development bureaucracies and encompasses local culture in developing countries, and secondly to highlight the role played by NGOs in translating and filtering narratives that produce projects and programs.
Across ten detailed chapters, the author takes the Bangladeshi organization known as BRAC (not an acronym, but simply the name of the world’s largest NGO) as his entry point to analyze a series of important and original questions. What does it mean for an NGO to pursue an agenda of trying to bring about societal change? What effect does NGO work have on Bangladesh’s societal values at the local level? How does the NGO translate, mediate, and diffuse external Western ideas about developmentalist social change at the local level and what are the social and cultural implications of this for local populations? How does an NGO manage the conflict of values that occurs within an organization that tries to balance its obligations to thirty million women with whom it works with its position within the global development system? The resulting narratives around women, patriarchy, and poverty in Bangladesh are the focus of the book.
Central to the book’s conceptual framework is the author’s suggestion that a “global policy language” has emerged that has created a universalizing discourse within NGO worlds as these take shape in local developing country contexts. This embodies six main elements: it builds consensus and equality among poor people; it promotes a positive view of economic growth as a solution to poverty, along with a set of “non-negotiable” values around human rights, gender, and governance that serve to underpin NGO work; it creates unintended “casualties” of the development process in the form of people who do not fit the intended outcomes; it generates organizational cultures of reflection and continuous improvement through processes of regular experimentation; and finally, it operates to construct narratives of excluded and poor women that are essentially decontextualized.
The monograph covers a huge amount of ground. It presents a systematic analysis of the social and political context of Bangladesh, the history and evolution of the NGO sector in the country, and considers how local understandings of hierarchy and equality intersect with NGO work. This is situated within the ever-changing development policy and practice landscape which results in “every five to six years with the replacement of old agendas by new ones” (36). The NGO is carefully revealed as a complex hybrid of a local project and international relationships, such that it does not easily fit the conventional notion of a bounded organizational entity.
The idea of a shifting “global policy language” is central to the author’s analysis, which is a distinctive contribution of the book. There is also a valuable discussion of the research methodology used, the relationship between anthropology and development, and the role that “applied” NGO research plays in the life world of an NGO. The disjuncture between managerial and academic knowledge is usefully probed in the reflexive sections of the book, which are frequent and full of insight. A key strength is the way the author is constantly alive to the complexities raised by his earlier career as an NGO worker in a variety of settings and as a development consultant, and the difficult relationships that arise when NGOs position themselves as both commissioners and consumers of development research. The fifth chapter, which discusses the “cooperative antagonism” that arises between researchers and managers, was for this reader one of the genuine highlights of the book.
Bangladesh is a country that possesses an extensive NGO sector and where these organizations play important—but largely understudied—roles in the lives of large numbers of people. This book helps us to better understand why and how NGOs like BRAC have effects that go way beyond the stated aims of development projects and interventions.
David Lewis
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom
pp. 381-383