Abstract
AbstractRoma-related development and policy discourse often represents the Roma development ‘subjects’ as disempowered victims. Against the pervasiveness of such narratives, a close look at the local level conflicts arising during the implementation of a World Bank development project in destitute Roma communities from Romania lays bare the strategies of unassisted social mobility in which a group of Roma engage. Not large or well-defined enough to be constituted into a real ‘class’ in sociological terms, this strategic group is made up of Roma civil servants (mediators, local experts, Romani language teachers) who negotiate their engagement in development projects on their own terms and use the material and immaterial resources that projects offer to enact their own upward social mobility. Often, though, this comes at the cost of a growing socio-economic gap between themselves and the most destitute parts of Roma communities, which complicates their involvement in development projects. The article underlines the necessity of taking into account both the strategies of unassisted social mobility of Roma development brokers, and the internal power imbalances that the development apparatus inevitably ends up producing in Roma communities.
Highlights
Most of the literature addressing social mobility among the Roma from Central and Eastern Europe does so in the context of transnational migration following the fall of the Berlin Wall (Grill, 2015; Matras and Leggio, 2017; Durst, 2018; Ivasiuc, 2018a; Pontrandolfo, 2018; Racleș, 2018)
This article aims at filling this gap in scholarship on social mobility among the Roma in Romania by drawing upon the anthropology of development literature that emphasizes the creative and resisting agency of development ‘subjects’, and the ways in which they enact their own strategies of upward social mobility by using the resources – both material and immaterial – that development projects make available to them
This article focuses on a World Bank development project implemented in over one hundred destitute Roma communities in Romania between 2008 and 2010, and analyses how strategies of social mobility become visible through the conflicts played out in the development encounter
Summary
Roma-related development and policy discourse often represents the Roma development ‘subjects’ as disempowered victims. Not large or well-defined enough to be constituted into a real ‘class’ in sociological terms, this strategic group is made up of Roma civil servants (mediators, local experts, Romani language teachers) who negotiate their engagement in development projects on their own terms and use the material and immaterial resources that projects offer to enact their own upward social mobility. Often, though, this comes at the cost of a growing socio-economic gap between themselves and the most destitute parts of Roma communities, which complicates their involvement in development projects.
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