Bruno itibaren 5231 Unterweinberg, Avusturya itibaren 5231 Unterweinberg, Avusturya

Read for 2009 Spring Challenge 25.4

Most postdevelopment literature focuses on the limitations of development and conservation projects. These works often set out to: demonstrate the failure of technical projects to enable political action; focus on the ways technical projects artificially enclose problems; and the way current solutions often lead to unintended consequences. Not all post-development literature is patently negative and defeatist, but quite a bit is. For me, Tania Murray Li's book is different -- perhaps in some ways even "modern" (as opposed to postmodern) in its approach. Tania Murray Li sets out to demonstrate two things: the will to improve is stubborn; and that this stubborn will to improve often survives the misadventures of development and conservation projects. Unlike a lot of scholarly work, this book seems almost literary in its ambition. By trying to demonstrate how the "will to improve" permeates a wide range of improvement projects the author often seems to make a larger point about the human condition. (Even the term "human condition" often gets much maligned by postmodern scholars who disparage "essentializing" discourses). In Sulawesi, Indonesia the colonial interventions caused death, destruction, and impoverishment because they ignored local ecology, livelihoods, and cultures. New Order interventions were a little better but were narrowly sectoral and failed to plan ahead. Though the integrated development and conservation plans had all the "right" components of development as conceived in 1990s (micro-credit, participatory planning, and community development), implementation was uneven. The participatory interventions of the World Bank—though done with loan funds—represented an ethnographic turn, were bottom-up, and avoided much of the corruption and accountability problems of the other projects. Through failure, uneven success, and unexpected follow on problems, the will to improve would not go away. Though Li simultaneously employs several theorists to help tease out meaning in her work, eventually these theoretical tools end up returning her to her essential theme of the will to improve. As a motif that ties the disparate strands of her work together, it is much superior to any of the several theoretical tools she uses individually and overcomes many of the limitations of defeatist postmodern accounts of development.

Excelente!!!.. gran mezcla de historia con aventuras personales que hacen que uno se identifique plenamente con el autor y entender la experiencia que ha tenido... absolutamente necesario para quien quiera conocer Africa... vale la pena tenerlo