Constructing Tanzanian Enterpreneurial Subjects: Neoliberal Development Through Local Governance

Abstract

This paper examines how the simultaneous enhancement of local governance and capacity building as a development strategy advances the idea not only of the self-help and self-responsibility of communities but, above all, how this strategy of neoliberal development is a form of production of subjectivity through which individuals are constituted as homo oeconomicus, or, more precisely, as entrepreneurial subjects. Employing Foucault’s insights from two series of lectures, given at the Collège de France, titled Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, the article examines neoliberal development incentives and policies as an effect closely related to the government of individuals as a part of a specific community or locality. These insights are reflected through the specific case study of the Tanzanian Social Action Fund. The case of TASAF shows, when analysed on two diverse but complementary levels, of delineation (descriptive) and implementation (through concrete practices), how governmental (neoliberal) strategy, by employing moral dimensions, shapes individuals into entrepreneurial subjects who act with economically rational and are at the same time convinced that improvement of their own lives depends predominantly on themselves.