Tanzania is a ‘development state’, fiscally reliant on foreign aid from donor states and international organisations, creating an ‘unequal relationship’ that has shaped modes of governance, culture and society. As an anthropologist and sometimes community development adviser with two and a half decades of experience in Tanzania, Maia Green provides an overview of continuities and changes in Tanzanian development culture from the last years of socialism through the neo-liberal era since the early 1990s until recent years. But she goes so far as to unconvincingly associate development culture with the advent of colonialism under ‘Bismarck's Germany’ through British colonialism, which she takes seriously as a manifestation of international development as a League of Nations mandate. Colonial-era mobilisation of local communities for mostly agricultural development became the leitmotif of post-independence Tanzania as well, when the village as a unit of political culture and economic modernisation was reified during the ujamaa socialist era.

Much of the book is organised around purported local case studies of community engagement with ‘participatory planning’, which was the framework for poverty reduction, local democratisation, and economic development under the aegis of the World Bank and other international actors from the 1990s and the end of the Cold War. In contrast to studies that focus on particular participatory development projects, such as community forestry or wildlife management, we rarely get a sense of what community organisers do in this book, and Tanzanians appear more as a generic backdrop rather than as agents. An exception is a case study of a local family of traditional healers seeking to modernise their business of cleansing customers from the mal-effects of witchcraft associated with modernisation. Yet it is difficult to see how this chapter fits in with a book centred on examining how organising for community development has become a mode of local political culture, which some villagers only reluctantly participate in as one of the only means of access to revenue provided by donors, but controlled by a national bureaucratic elite. Other people attach themselves to NGOs as signifiers of modernity and avenues for employment, status and authority.

This book is stitched together from previously published articles, so there is a great deal of repetition, the chronology is scattered, and the prose is often tortured and unintelligible (e.g. ‘modalities of responsibilisation’, p. 8). Green spends time examining the ‘artefacts’ and rituals of ‘official offices’ that are standardised across the country at different levels of government. The last chapter, which looks at an emergent ‘middle income’ (not ‘class’) culture associated with a recent economic take-off resulting from foreign investment, rather than donor aid, focuses on the ‘supermarket style’ of relatively affluent urban dwellers. These are people with access to credit that they use to invest in farms, motorcycle taxis and mobile phones to supplement income from teaching or government service, a departure from the socialist era and its leadership code. When these people go to the supermarket, they are not consumers, rather, under Green's scrutinising gaze, they are ‘enacting’ and ‘performing’ middle income culture that sets them apart from the rural majority. Despite the emerging market free-for-all, the lessening of donor influence serves to entrench state centralisation and allows the bureaucratic elite to set its own priorities.