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How Development Projects Persist
Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs
By (author)
Erin Beck
Genres:
Gender studies: women, Social & cultural anthropology, Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
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Synopsis
In How Development Projects Persist Erin Beck examines microfinance NGOs working in Guatemala and problematizes the accepted wisdom of how NGOs function. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how development models and plans become entangled in the relationships among local actors in ways that alter what they are, how they are valued, and the conditions of their persistence. Beck focuses on two NGOs that use drastically different methods in working with poor rural women in Guatemala. She highlights how each program's beneficiaries-diverse groups of savvy women-exercise their agency by creatively appropriating, resisting, and reinterpreting the lessons of the NGOs to match their personal needs. Beck uses this dynamic-in which the goals of the developers and women do not often overlap-to theorize development projects as social interactions in which policymakers, workers, and beneficiaries critically shape what happens on the ground. This book displaces the notion that development projects are top-down northern interventions into a passive global south by offering a provocative account of how local conditions, ongoing interactions, and even fundamental tensions inherent in development work allow such projects to persist, but in new and unexpected ways. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
"Erin Beck has made a lasting contribution to the field of development studies in theorising development as a social interaction while also raising important issues for policy and practice. How Development Projects Persist is a call to contemplate, assess and study development not simply according to the goals of policymakers and organisations, but according to the larger vision and life goals of the people that interventions hope to serve." -- Bronwen Gillespie * Anthropology in Action * "The strength of Why Development Projects Persist is the quality of Beck's data. . . . Beck writes her ethnographic data with completeness and clarity, which allows the reader to understand the intentions of these organizations, the worldviews of participants, and the ways these clashed as the NGOs' visions of development were put into practice." -- Laura J. Heideman * American Journal of Sociology * "The text's strength lies in its conceptual breadth and accessibility. . . . An easy, yet enlightening read. . . . Beck effectively shows rather than just tells what development encounters look like and how they are interpreted by the actors involved." -- Monica DeHart * Anthropological Quarterly * "This book. . . is useful to those interested in international studies, development studies, as well as development practitioners. . . . Further, Beck's detailed analysis is well-written and jargon-free, and presents us with a balanced and longitudinal view of NGO development projects in Guatemala." -- Michelle Moran-Taylor * Journal of Latin American Geography *