The empirical heart of this book is an exploration of the self-positioning and self-reflections on the work of development NGOs operating in coastal Tanzania’s Bagamoyo District. Kathy Dodworth proposes that this material documents practices through which NGOs legitimate their authority to intervene in people’s lives (e.g., p. 34).
Chapter 3 focuses on the claims that a Tanzanian and two international NGOs make regarding the spatial (and temporal) reach of their operations. An emphasis on broad spatial coverage—Dodworth calls this the practice of “extensity” (p. 59)—is set against what is designated the practice of “territoriality” (p. 59), which, rather than aiming for ubiquity, carves out exclusive territory; for instance, a specific village. Chapter 4 shows how extensity lends itself naturally to a strategy of partnering up with the local state. Thus, the claim of broad reach and longevity made by an internationally operating NGO working on HIV/AIDS and women’s and children’s rights helped position it as a serious partner for district-level government, for instance, in the collection of reports from other NGOs and village committees. Its close association with district-level government did not, however, play well for this NGO in a village whose leadership was in a legal battle over an investment company’s land claims because the district authorities were perceived to be complicit with land grabs (pp. 106, 190). This presented an opening for another international NGO that was positioning itself as an advocate on land rights. A strong alliance between the village leadership and that second NGO turned the village into that NGO’s “territorialized” turf, hindering the operations of the state-aligned NGO.
Chapter 5 discusses NGOs’ recruitment of volunteers as a key strategy in projecting extensity. It also offers interesting observations about the political and moral economies of voluntarism. In Tanzania, voluntarism operates in a context in which work for the public good has long been valorized centrally by the socialist state of the 1960s through the mid-1980s. Such “voluntary” work has also been extracted, at times coercively. The chapter shows how village-level volunteers negotiate this terrain, evincing public-oriented commitment to their work while at the same time chafing at “being volunteered” by village-level leadership and being offered insufficient or nonexistent allowances in a context of material deprivation.
In addition to bolstering claims to extensity, local volunteers, as presumed guarantors of closeness to the “community,” also serve to underpin NGOs’ claims of representation, the subject of chapter 6. Dodworth notes that NGO activities in development involve a curious double move on this count. Being constructed around the notion of acting on behalf and in the interest of others, development claims proximity. But it must also conjure distance—in expertise, knowledge, awareness, and disposition—from its “beneficiaries.” It is this distance that generates the need to not just stand for but also act for others (p. 147). The chapter’s empirical material illustrates this “othering” construction of development’s targets. Statements by NGO and government staff trade in familiar tropes as they impute laziness or a lack of awareness to local populations. Conversely, however, some also question both such tropes (pp. 154–55) and the entire enterprise of intervening on behalf of others (pp. 156, 161). Dodworth frames this chapter as a contribution to what she calls “representational theory” (p. 143). An engagement with the rich critical literature on empowerment and participatory development may have sharpened this discussion.
The final empirical chapter surveys a variety of issues arising around what Dodworth calls “informational relations” (p. 170); in essence, the collection of data and various reporting and monitoring activities. Such activities are shown to be not only burdensome but also sites of resistance, when the sharing of data and information is refused. NGOs may do so because they may not wish to validate competitors in their attempt to set themselves up as coordinators and monitors on behalf of the local state. But the targets of NGOs’ interventions may be reluctant to share information too; for instance, when it comes to reporting “human rights” violations such as violence or rape. This refusal ultimately amounts to resistance to the kind of interventions that the sharing of such information enables because reporting to political authorities or involving the police or the legal system may be dangerous and undesirable (p. 191).
In Dodworth’s framing, the interesting material summarized in plain language here shows “six legitimation practices …: extensity/territoriality; state relations; voluntarism; representation; and the materiality of information” (p. 8; emphases in the original). It makes sense to interpret the various claims to represent others discussed in chapter 6 as indicative of a practice aimed at legitimation. But it is far from clear how various statements by NGO staff concerning a variety of problems around information gathering—chapter 7’s title is “‘Reporting Has All Sorts of Issues!’”—are indicative of, far less amount to, a “practice.” Simply naming such issues around information the practice of “materiality of information” does not help the reader understand how and why it could and ought to be understood thusly. The same applies when NGOs’ declarations regarding the breadth and depth of their operations are designated the practice of “extensity/territoriality,” when aligning with the state (or failing to do so) is referred to as the practice of “state relations,” and when the use of volunteers is declared the practice of “voluntarism.”
To the extent to which such activities and claims make NGOs out to be competent and reliable partners to a variety of audiences that include local state authorities, beneficiary communities, and their own headquarters and donors, it is furthermore unclear whether “legitimation” is the best way of describing this. On this count, the effort devoted to shoehorning the book’s interesting empirical material into “six legitimation practices” ultimately comes at the expense of attention to the nuances of the strategic deployment of such claims, the receptions of such activities, and what might make them (fail to) resonate with different audiences.
More broadly, much of the considerable space that the book dedicates to expounding on its analytical framing is taken up by offhand gestures in many different directions that, to this reviewer, tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate the empirical material—if it meaningfully connects to it at all. The reader repeatedly learns, for instance, that “state-society divisions do not hold much water” (pp. 9, 91, cf. 27). But, with no substantive discussion of how we might then think about “the state” or “society” or whether we should use these concepts at all, the book swiftly reverts to treating them as distinct entities when discussing different ways that NGOs position themselves vis-à-vis “the state”—declarations about their coproduction and the designation of the result as the “non/state” (p. 9) notwithstanding. Although Pierre Bourdieu’s work receives a more substantial discussion (pp. 30–33), its use in the book boils down to the questionable assertion that “the Tanzanian district had all the hallmarks of a Bourdieusian field” (p. 45), essentially qua being an important administrative level. Michel Foucault is ostensibly enlisted because his notion of power is “not attributive, to individuals or institutions, but is relational” (p. 29; emphases in the original). Yet, a few lines down, “Foucauldian analysis” is (confusingly) faulted for “affording covert forms of power to an implied elite” (p. 29). Dodworth then claims that “the book tempers the urge shared by Foucault and Bourdieu to reduce legitimation to the transmission of state-generated ideology” (p. 35). Although it is unclear on what the allegation of such an urge might be based, it is clear that Foucault emphatically rejected centering an analysis of power on either ideology or the state.
It is, to this reader, hard to make sense of the book’s analytical framings and broader arguments because they are set out by way of such broad-brush declarations and assertions with little substantive resonance in the empirical discussion. The book’s strength is instead its rich documentation of the struggles and dilemmas of development NGOs operating in a particular Global South setting. On this score, it is a worthwhile read.
