New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. xii, 214 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9781978816442.
In this rigorously researched and highly readable monograph, Nayma Qayum takes us on a fascinating journey into the heart of a specific development intervention undertaken in rural Bangladesh by the NGO BRAC. Qayum’s account focuses on the case of the Polli Shomaj (PS) women’s group formation program, designed to support women’s negotiations with government and other service providers, improve access to legal redress in relation to issues such as gender violence, and strengthen women’s representation in local governance. Combining fine-grain qualitative and quantitative analysis within a theoretically informed institutionalist approach, this is a fine, eloquently argued book that speaks both to researchers and practitioners in the field of development. An analysis of the PS initiative, Qayum argues, “illustrates that institutional shifts happen when actors negotiate the rules-in-use, enact new rules, act as enforcers of those rules, and impose sanctions on community members who violate them” (148).
Divided into three parts, Village Ties begins by introducing Bangladesh’s context and history as a location for human development, focusing on both local and external efforts to change women’s lives, as well as the religious and secular dimensions of these efforts. There is a particularly useful discussion of the ways in which the collectivist approach of PS challenges the individualized logics of what Qayum terms the dominant “neoliberal development model.” The book then moves on to discuss institutional aspects of the intervention, considering both formal and informal dimensions. Data is gathered both from areas where PS groups are active, and from an area where they are not, to understand whether its presence influences “rules in use.” The research design is impressively systematic and rigorous. The study draws on 2,684 semi-structured interviews, descriptive statistics, and multilevel logistic regression combined with an in-depth qualitative analysis. The next chapter focuses on patron-client relations, and finds them to be declining as a means of accessing services by the poor. In the PS areas, Qayum finds that patronage is being replaced by forms of short-term money-based exchange she terms “transactionalism”: an informal means of accessing services that is more accessible than clientelism, even though it may be classed as a type of corruption. This is followed by a chapter that examines access to legal services, where Qayum finds that in PS areas, the biases of the village court against women, minorities, and poor people are challenged through local-level action, leading to improved representation of women’s voices and better outcomes than elsewhere.
The third and final part of the book provides its most distinctive contribution by showing how these PS groups, and by extension non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as BRAC, can under certain circumstances serve to bring people together and reshape their relationships with state and community. Women try to influence “distribution practices” both by negotiating with local government officials around the moral imperatives of serving the poor, as well as with community leaders to try to change prevailing expectations about who should get what. The author shows how NGO-formed groups can make this happen both within and outside local government structures, and that it is the locally embedded character of these groups that gives them the information and the legitimacy to open up negotiating spaces.
I learned a great deal from this original and nuanced account of institutions, power, and civil society in Bangladesh. The richness and depth of the research highlights the enormous range and complexity of long-term NGO development work in contrast to a research literature that now feels increasingly polarized between naivety and pessimism. With its impressive methodology, the book ably demonstrates how qualitative and quantitative data can be combined in ways that bring rigour without compromising the value of either approach. This book should be read not only for its thoughtful contents and findings but also because it offers a useful and compelling model for PhD students and others undertaking multi-disciplinary mixed methods research in the field.
There were three areas where I felt the book could be strengthened. The first is that the author could have drawn on more of the relevant literature beyond Bangladesh, where there is exciting work exploring both the opportunities and the limits to new forms of citizenship and social solidarity. For example, the findings here resonate with work about the extent to which Global South NGOs contribute to reworkings of citizenship ideas and practices (such as Analiese Richard’s The Unsettled Sector: NGOs and the Cultivation of Democratic Citizenship in Rural Mexico, Stanford University Press, 2016). Second, while the broad “neoliberal development” framing used in the book is appropriate, I wanted to know more about what the study findings tell us about how neoliberalism continues to evolve and change, the particular form it now takes in Bangladesh, and the scope for organizations such as BRAC to challenge it. As Rajesh Venugopal has argued (“Neoliberalism as concept,” Economy and Society 44, no. 2 (2015): 165–187), the term neoliberalism is often used rather loosely: Do neoliberal gender concerns really go back to 1975? Is a context in which the government increasingly extends its control into civil society and corporate spaces really “neoliberal”? Organizations like BRAC are often seen as themselves neoliberal actors, but are they also part of a countertendency through which parts of the neoliberal agenda are also contested, as seems to be shown here? Finally, I found the definition of NGO provided in the book to be rather at odds with conventional thinking (few researchers would include donors and inter-governmental agencies in the category NGO, as the author appears to do on page 9). A fuller conceptualization of exactly what NGOs are would further sharpen the analysis.
These are minor quibbles. Village Ties is a book that should be read by anyone tired of the dominant emphasis on private-sector-driven models of development on the one hand, and the backlash against NGOs as actors capable of contributing positively to development on the other. As this monograph carefully shows, homegrown NGOs such as BRAC have the potential to initiate and support local political change.
David Lewis
London School of Economics and Political Science, London