Flexibility through poverty - self-perception and tactics for accessing resources among local NGO-Agents in West Africa (B06)

• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230856760

Non-state development cooperation is an entanglement of NGOs, states and international donors, which is subject to the conjunctures of global trends. During the first phase of funding, field-work conducted in Burkina Faso returned the paradoxical result that the establishment and development of special infrastructures resulted in weakening the capacity to act. Starting from this point of departure, the project looks into history and the present of non-state development cooperation in the West-African region in general. By comparing three countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal) and employing an ethno-historical approach, the question arises: to what extent is the observed weakness of a single NGO in the region universally valid, and whether there is any more pervasive logic in the ascription of durable weakness. The weakness of local actors not only is the result of being “weak actors” but is the result of historically grown fields of negotiation, in which one’s own situation constitutes the possibility and the limits for the appropriation of resources.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1095: Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes
• Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Hans Peter Hahn