Modernity Lacks Care: Community-based Development and the Moral Economy of Households in Eastern Nagaland

Debojyoti Das

doi:10.1177/0973174120920392

Abstract

The article examines two aspects of development presented through an ethnographic study of the project ‘Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development’. First is the discursive construction of project beneficiaries as poor, underdeveloped and backward in modernist literature. Second, the article captures inter-household negotiations around developmental resources in the context of microcredit. Drawing on participant observations, oral histories and household interviews, I explore the micro-politics of everyday life to reflect on the contesting representations of ‘beneficiary community’ and ‘project experts’. In addition, I analyse the struggle within the community for resources made available by the project. This illuminates the actors, networks and institutions involved in community development programmes and problematizes ideal conceptualization of communities as a site for collective participation. The article highlights practices of objectification and the creation of a populist discourse on participation that overlooks multiple layers of patronage, public and self-interest exercised by project beneficiaries in community development programmes. Additionally, the article investigates how the lack of ‘care’ in modernist participatory agricultural development discourse undermines the community’s aspirations for development and establishes a rupture between policy and practice.

Highlights

I engage with the moral economy of development that ‘never fails’, as projects continue to build on their failures and successes through a discourse of ‘improvement’
As David Mosse argues, project success and failure are more a practice of interpretation than realities on the ground (Mosse, 2005, p. 18). This observation applies to the Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development (NEPED) intervention in Sadar2 village, which is the subject of this article
I analyse arguments by Mosse (2005) and Pigg (1992) that community-led development projects have an inbuilt rationale of progress and moral improvement, cast through the objectification of beneficiaries as ‘primitive and backward’ and as recipients of aid and subsidies

Summary

Introduction

I engage with the moral economy of development that ‘never fails’, as projects continue to build on their failures and successes through a discourse of ‘improvement’. While building on arguments put forward by Mosse, the article adds to the analysis of development policy and practice by examining the lack of ‘care’ within critical sustainable development discourse and the absence of a pluriversal ethos in decentralized bottom-up schemes. I examine the controlling nature of community-driven development projects as represented in the NEPED project literature. Project beneficiaries lose their autonomy and agency as they are characterized as ‘primitive’, ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘non-enterprising’. Indigenous knowledge systems on farming practices are not seen as equal to scientific ways of agriculture, based on a distinct ontological ethos of crop care and management

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion