Introduction
What have been the consequences of developmentalism for African workers? We know that colonial economies were premised on the extraction of unpaid African labor and that European abolitionism went hand in hand with the introduction of new forms of coercive labor recruitment.Footnote 1 What has been explored less systematically is how the idea of development was mobilized in response to the colonial state's demand for cheap labor when compulsory recruitment and conscription were banned.Footnote 2 This special issue shows that the colonial discourse of development re-labeled work that otherwise could have been classified as forced labor (and as such would have contravened the 1930 ILO's Forced Labor Convention) as “voluntary work,” “self-help,” or “human investment.”Footnote 3 In this process, certain sections of African labor were rendered invisible as workers, and recast as “beneficiaries,” “participants,” and “volunteers.”
What kinds of work did development programs generate? With what consequences for different categories of workers, from “experts” to “beneficiaries”? What legal frameworks have been regulating the management of work carried out in the name of “development”? Contributions to this special issue explore these questions across seven different colonial and national contexts: Zanzibar and Ghana, respectively in former British East and West Africa (McMahon and Wiemers), Niger in former French West Africa (Rossi), Mozambique in former Portuguese South-east Africa (Kagan-Guthrie), Americo-Liberian governments in independent West Africa (Whyte), Katanga in former Belgian Congo (Loffman), and Somalia in former Italian East Africa (Urbano). In each of these contexts, twentieth century developmentalism opened up spaces in which African workers were classified, managed, and controlled, but in which they also elaborated their own strategies of self-development.
From Forced Labor to Working for Development: Main Findings
The articles in this issue reiterate that colonial and post-colonial developmentalism was less an exercise in the politics of altruism than a way to entrench control over African resources and people.Footnote 4 The claim to develop provided an ideological justification for the territorial control of regions thought to be resource-rich or strategically important. Colonial and independent governments used developmentalist logics to justify territorial claims: in Katanga, studied by Reuben Loffman in this issue, this happened under Leopold II's Congo Free State, then in Belgian Congo and in Mobutu's Zaire. Successive political elites sought to control cash crops and mineral resources. The region's political instability made it a zone perceived as requiring close supervision both by President Mobutu, who feared revolts that would destabilize his government, and by the United States in the Cold War era. Development programs enabled the entrenchment of national and international control over this region. In a similar fashion, the independent Americo-Liberian government discussed by Christine Whyte feared French and British colonial encroachment upon its borders. “Developing the interior” became a way to display effective control of its hinterland. When independent Zairian and Liberian governments lacked the funding required to finance their development programs, they turned to foreign donors. Katanga received USAID funds; Liberia received American funding through the establishment of a Firestone project for the development of rubber plantations.
In the case of Somalia, also discussed in this issue, Italy had not been a major colonial empire. It adopted a developmentalist stance to justify its intervention in fertile areas with the explicit aim of expanding Italian agricultural enterprise through what were presented as mutually beneficial activities, but which, in fact, made widespread use of coerced labor, especially in the Fascist period. As these three cases show, in different political contexts—Katanga in an “old” colonial empire, independent Liberia, and Somalia under “young” Italian rule—developmentalism enabled the entrenchment of control over regions classified as “underdeveloped.” This is a well-known consequence of developmentalism that has been broadly documented.Footnote 5 This special issue focuses specifically on a less studied question: the consequences of “development” for African labor.
One fundamental finding of the studies in this issue is that development discourse legitimized the recruitment of unpaid or underpaid labor because work which contributed to development was represented as self-help. This is a corollary of an essential feature of developmentalism: its claim to operate for the good of the target population.Footnote 6 This claim became particularly important after the passing of the ILO's Forced Labor Convention, which coincided with the intensification of the League of Nations’ pressure on colonial empires to enforce their own anti-slavery legislation.Footnote 7 The rise of developmentalism in its modern form corresponds to the demise of the political legitimacy of forced labor in the colonies. It made possible, inter alia, the continuing enrolment of African workers into production and infrastructure building schemes for a minimal remuneration.
The articles in this special issue reveal the systematic use of forced labor, including conditions that were defined by contemporary critics as “slavery-like,” in colonial development programs after the adoption and ratification of the Forced Labor Convention. Labor was used for a variety of “developmental” purposes ranging from public works construction (Loffman, Whyte, Urbano, Wiemers, Kagan Guthrie, Rossi) to food production aimed at keeping food prices low in cities (Loffman, Zanzibar) to the growing of cash crops for sale below market prices to state controlled marketing boards or private entrepreneurs (Whyte, Loffman, Urbano, McMahon). In some contexts, labor itself was the main resource of a particular region and developmentalist discourse made possible the continued export of workers from regions considered labor reservoirs to localities where labor accrued larger profits to employers under the guise of emergency response to famine (Kagan-Guthrie). In short, developmentalism made the continuation of labor coercion possible by representing work done in the name of development as beneficial to the workers and their communities.
A second important finding of the articles in this issue is that colonial developmentalist regimes outsourced the coercive elements of recruitment to indigenous contractors who subjected workers to intimidation and fear. Chiefs often fulfilled this role.Footnote 8 While paying lip service to respect for tradition, colonial developers feigned ignorance of the chiefs’ coercive recruitment practices. The view of development as beneficial to its recipients implied an emphasis on spontaneous popular participation. The idea that local communities, led by their representatives, were the actual initiators of development schemes allowed colonial administrators to deny accountability for the coercive methods employed by chiefs when it became harder for colonial bureaucracies to use forced labor for public works.
Wiemers's article traces the evolution of the relation between chiefs and colonial administrators in Ghana's Northern Territories. It shows that in the 1920s, as District Commissioners faced both local resistance and rising international criticism of forced labor, they ignored evidence of chiefly coercion as well as popular opposition by relying on chiefs who constructed roads “on their own initiative.”Footnote 9 By the 1930s, in the wake of the ILO's convention, reliance on chiefs had become both a rhetorical cover for colonial brutality and a way to pursue development without much money. Administrators re-classified roads so that their maintenance could be justified as necessary for the benefit of the local community, and therefore exempt from the forced labor ban. They then claimed that chiefs had “volunteered” to oversee workers in schemes that their communities would allegedly benefit from. Concurrently, however, they made it clear to chiefs that resistance to organizing “volunteer” road-work would result in cuts to colonial development funds to their regions.Footnote 10
The circumstances in Barue under Portuguese rule in the early 1960s are strikingly similar to the ones described for Ghana:
the administrator of Mungari said that “the roads cannot be repaired,” since forced labor had been abolished; three months later, he reversed himself, and reported that people had restarted working on the roads for no pay, a system they supposedly preferred because they worked for shorter periods, and because “money has no value for them.” Other administrators similarly justified the return of unpaid road work as a voluntary preference on the part of residents, allegedly out of a desire to help develop their communities; the administrator of Macossa, for example, reported “As is customary, the natives have voluntarily begun repairing the pathways leading the administrative post to areas in the interior,” then added that this “custom” had been reinstated by him the previous year, and that the workers would not be getting paid.Footnote 11
Kagan Guthrie adds that while “administrators were now strictly banned from directly conscripting forced workers […] they could, and did, pressure people into accepting migrant labor through the local ‘chiefs’ which the district administrator called ‘a sure method of reaching the objectives in view without breaking legal norms’.”Footnote 12 Colonial administrators used chiefs as labor contractors and this enabled them to deny involvement in recruitment methods that they knew to be problematic, if not outright illegal.
In the case of Zanzibar analyzed by McMahon after World War Two the Colonial Office received a request by the British Resident in Zanzibar to extend legislation that would allow the requisition of land required for food crop planting on which local workers were made to work and forced to sell part of the produce at a fixed price to feed Zanzibar Town.Footnote 13 The Colonial Office debated whether the requested extension would contravene the ILO's Forced Labor Convention. To avoid problems, it recommended “to get the Sultan [of Zanzibar] to pass an anti-famine legislative order and use that as cover for the coerced labor practices.”Footnote 14
Colonial administrators argued that they used local intermediaries in order to avoid interference into local tradition; or that the communities themselves had volunteered their work autonomously or at the initiative of local chiefs; or that exceptional circumstances such as famines or wars justified mild coercion. Yet undeniably these strategies enabled them to avoid paying standard wages to adult workers. This raises the question of what would have counted as appropriate remuneration. This important ethical question deserves more consideration than it can receive in this special issue alone. But while this special issue does not attempt to articulate a moral argument, it demonstrates that the practices carried out in the name of development were ethically dubious by the standards of the time.
Had their recruitment practices been congruent with the ILO Forced Labor Convention, which embodied international normative thinking about labor standards, colonial administrators and national bureaucrats would not have resorted to dissimulation to conceal the coercion necessary to extract labor from workers who resisted recruitment. Indeed, when reports on forced recruitment in colonial development schemes leaked through the European media, they provoked scandalized reactions from the public.Footnote 15 Furthermore, had workers perceived employment as truly beneficial to them and competitive with the earnings they hoped to access through migration, they would have offered their services willingly to national or foreign “developers.”Footnote 16 But they did not: They opposed and resisted unpaid work re-classified as participation in their own development, and preferred migration in search of paid work.
It is significant that the only case of genuine volunteering discussed in this issue took place in the Sahelo-Saharan region of Niger studied by Rossi. Here, the workers employed by a project funded by Italy and managed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the 1980s and 1990s were mainly women. In this desert-edge region adult men migrated seasonally to work in African cities. Due to gender ideologies, the majority of women did not migrate. There were hardly any paid employment opportunities in the villages where they lived. For the poorest of these women, who were recurrently exposed to hunger, the daily meal offered to workers on the project's worksites was a desirable remuneration. They willingly contributed over twelve million working days to the Keita Project in about fifteen years up until the early 2000s. Their limited range of alternatives accounts for their eagerness to volunteer work under conditions that most local men did not accept.
A third key finding of this special issue is that migration posed a problem to developmentalist regimes because it amplified people's choices allowing them to resist recruitment in development projects.Footnote 17 Workers who had the option of accessing better opportunities abroad were not available for development schemes unless these schemes offered remuneration rates comparable to their earnings as migrants. Measures to control the free movement of workers were put in place to support “development.”Footnote 18 Hampering mobility through the threat of violence was the most direct way to curtail the exodus of potential “volunteers.” But control over mobility took multiple forms. Where migrant or alien workers were available, their outsider status gave them fewer rights than natives or citizens. National protective legislation did not apply to them and racist ideologies made their exploitation appear justifiable and “civilizing.” For example, the Liberian state imposed slavery-like working conditions on so-called re-captives and “Congoes” in the nineteenth century. Alternatively, the emigration of native workers could be curtailed legally: in 1964, President Tubman's vagrancy law in Liberia permitted the authoritarian relocation of workers in the interest of national development plans.Footnote 19
Hampering the free movement of people was not always easy: administrators struggled and often failed to stop migrants from moving to conditions they saw as more attractive. A District Commissioner in the Northern Territories Protectorate, cited by Wiemers, pondered in 1919 about “how one is to draw the line and distinguish when a man is a fugitive from work or when he is an emigrant to better his condition.”Footnote 20 Loffman shows that in Congo the administration was faced with bottlenecks in labor recruitment when they could not legally stop men from migrating.Footnote 21 In the case of Italian Somalia, studied by Urbano in the interwar period, Italy tried to manage the problem of Italian migrants leaving Italy in large numbers, as well as the problem of Somali migration within Somalia. Italy's national Committee for Emigration initially sought to direct Italian migrants toward its colonies. But when the cost of Italian labor appeared too high, Italy developed a plan to provide farming inputs and technology on Somali-owned land where indigenous workers would contribute their labor as a form of “shared participation” (compartecipazione) in agricultural development.Footnote 22 A large resettlement scheme moved entire families and communities to the irrigation schemes of the Società Agricola Italo-Somala (SAIS), with “traditional” chiefs likely acting as intermediaries between the communities and company management. Efforts to curtail the mobility of laborers in resettlement schemes resulted in brutal forms of labor surveillance to stop mutinies. In all of these cases, workers voted with their feet. When they were free to move, they opted out of projects allegedly devised for their own development. Developers needed volunteers; when volunteers were not forthcoming, they were forced.
A fourth finding of this issue is that the slow progress or failure of development was never seen as an outcome of undesirable employment conditions. It was normally blamed on the resistance and/or the backwards “nature” of the natives. In the early stages of colonial developmentalism these arguments took on overtly racist tones that justified paternalist coercion: recalcitrance, resistance, and unwillingness to cooperate were never considered rational reactions, but natural attitudes of lazy or uncivilized “Blacks” who had to be coerced for their own good: Coercion would supposedly teach them how to behave as free workers.Footnote 23
The ideology of the civilizing potential of colonial rule was inseparable from practices of labor control. Colonial powers arrogated to themselves the right to extract labor from Africans by positing that for “uncivilized” Africans working for colonialism amounted to working for their own civilization. In his 1931 study entitled “Work and Colonization,” published at the height of French debates on the ILO's Forced Labor Convention, Charles Fayet summed up colonial labor policy as follows:
It was necessary to recruit locally a workforce without which the colonies could neither survive nor develop. We already mentioned that some indigenous populations in their current state of social evolution “prefer suffering misery and hunger to [contributing] the slightest effort to the improvement of their own well-being.” It was therefore absolutely necessary that the colonizing power use its authority to impose the implementation of indispensable public works. To question this right, to deny it and to forbid its exercise, is tantamount to abandoning colonized countries to the worst physical and moral conditions, and to assist in the “bankruptcy of colonization.”Footnote 24
As late as 1944 a Portuguese Inspector reasoned that “the black is naturally averse to work, as he has an almost invincible tendency towards self-indulgence and is by nature lazy, and still has no sense of his moral duties. Thus, state action is necessary, because without work the life of a people becomes impossible…”Footnote 25 Following independence in the areas discussed in this issue, racism in official discourse mostly gave way to culturalism that essentialized African society. The racially inferior gave way to the under-developed.
Is Working for “Development” Developmental?
Contributions to this special issue highlight continuities and changes in two intertwined aspects of international intervention in Africa, namely, labor policies and development policies. The section above summarizes the issue's main findings in relation to colonial and post-colonial public work policies. It suggests that colonial developmentalism allowed administrators to manage some sections of the African workforce in continuity with earlier practices of labor coercion that had been rendered illicit by international legislation. This section discusses these findings in relation to debates on the effects of “development.” To do so, we must first clarify how we understand and apply this notion.
The notions of “development” and “developmentalism” are employed in at least two main ways in an extensive multi-disciplinary literature.Footnote 26 A first strand of development-focused research interprets the notion of development literally and uses it as an analytical concept. It focuses on the developmental strategies of different governments and institutions, and aims to assess their relative efficiency in terms of economic growth and other development indicators. The second strand approaches “development” as a hegemonic trope in political discourse. It emphasizes the historical rise of a rationale in which the representation of certain countries as “underdeveloped,” “developing,” or “low-development” (LDCs) has consequences for their international relations and standing. These two perspectives are not entirely disconnected: critiques of development often imply a claim that the discourse of development did/does not yield “actual development.” This claim presupposes some engagement with a literal understanding of the term.
Economic historian Gareth Austin has defined economic development as the “expansion of capacity to increase output per capita.”Footnote 27 In this definition, development is an economic parameter that can be used to compare the ability of various countries to increase output at different moments in time. Political economists working with this notion of “development” seek to establish which state-driven institutional arrangements have the potential to maximize economic growth especially in poor and low-income countries. This research approach looks at history to draw lessons from the past and inform policy.Footnote 28
By contrast, poststructuralist researchers advanced fundamental critiques of development, which they see, in the words of Arturo Escobar, as yielding “specific constructions of the colonial/Third World subject in/through discourse in ways that allow the exercise of power over it.”Footnote 29 They criticize post-colonial developmentalism as a fundamentally exploitative endeavor directed by northern powers and enabling the continuing subordination of the South.Footnote 30 The view that international development “aid” is a euphemized name for an imperialist and self-serving venture is still popular.Footnote 31 These critiques have in turn been criticized for attributing too much power to northern donors. Southern politicians and analysts saw the discourse of development “as a potential source of support for national empowerment and advancement.”Footnote 32 They reinterpreted it in original ways and actively promoted its implementation in southern countries.Footnote 33
Interpretations of developmentalism as purely hegemonic tend to conceal the ways in which African elites have been taking advantage of their privileged access to development discourses and funds to entrench their power, a behavior that Jean-Francois Bayart characterized as extraversion.Footnote 34 Those articles in this issue that extend their analysis into the post-independence period endorse this view: in independent Zaire (Loffman), Liberia (Whyte), and Niger (Rossi), and Zanzibar's post-revolutionary nationalist government (McMahon), the presidents mobilized a developmentalist discourse to justify coercive and/or exploitative recruitment practices. Non-elite Africans, too, have been turning “aid” to their own ends.Footnote 35 It is sometimes argued that this is what makes development a better option compared to alternative approaches to North-South relations.Footnote 36 But the fact that Africans—elites and commoners—have been successful in making policy (even authoritarian policy) work for them does not make such policies ipso facto benign or de facto developmental. The alleged superiority of developmentalism in terms of its humanitarian potential to effectively improve the conditions of poor countries and/or groups remains to be established.
In recognition of the opportunistic political employment of “development” to disguise labor exploitation, contributions to this special issue use the term “developmentalism” to signal that they do not take “development” at face value. They analyze critically the historical circumstances in which developmentalism evolved as a rationale of government. When, where, and why did development become a fundamental axiom of government? And with what consequences—in particular, what consequences for the management of labor and opportunities for workers?
Contributors do not ask whether the countries or regions they examined did or did not achieve economic growth or increased output per head. They explore the ways in which the idea of development allowed the continued coercion of workers. In the majority of cases, it is questionable whether such coercion could be deemed justified by its outcomes: The extent to which the projects examined here yielded sustained growth and demonstrable lifestyle improvements for the “beneficiary” communities is sometimes unclear, and mostly disappointing. And, of course, most analysts today would find the view that forced labor or slavery were justified because they helped national economies to develop completely unacceptable. This said, our argument is not that development plans failed, but that the labor question was not posed: rarely did developers see “beneficiaries” as workers; even more rarely did they debate openly whether the unfavorable working conditions that characterized the so-called beneficiaries’ participation were justified in developmental terms.
The claim that intervention was necessary to induce progress beneficial to the target society legitimized the mobilization of unpaid or underpaid labor. A corollary of this argument is that developers have been represented as benefactors of those designated as “to be developed,” who were expected to participate willingly in activities initiated for their own good. Defined in such broad terms, developmentalism can be seen as a style of government that rises and wanes in different places and at different moments in time.Footnote 37 We can examine and compare European developmentalism, Russian developmentalism, Chinese developmentalism, Islamic developmentalism, or post-World-War-Two developmentalism. Did the Omani Arabs who established clove plantations in Zanzibar and Pemba from the 1830s on pose as developers of these regions and societies? Did the reformist elites of the Sokoto Caliphate in what is today Northern Nigeria pose as developers of the Hausaphone societies that pre-existed the nineteenth-century Caliphate? How did these endeavors differ, if at all, from those of Europe's colonial empires? Irrespective of how one would answer these questions, they presuppose a critical distance from the mantra of development. Like the notion of colonialism, the notion of developmentalism signals a critical approach toward development as a self-evident remedy to the challenges faced by poor countries, and places development in historical perspective.
Multiple genealogies have been advanced for twentieth-century developmentalism. Suzanne Moon sees the Dutch new Ethical Policies in the East Indies as precursors of more recent Dutch developmentalism.Footnote 38 Antony Hopkins speaks of “Britain's first development plan for Africa” in relation to the campaign to suppress the slave trade from 1815 onwards.Footnote 39 Joe Hodge argues that Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain was the first to devise development strategies in the British colonial empire when he served as Secretary of State for the Colonies at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 40 Robin Law's work on the Royal Africa Company's plantation projects highlights early examples of British developmentalism in a volume that reflects on European commercial agriculture initiatives in Africa.Footnote 41 The developmentalist overtones that colored these potential alternatives to the slave trade resurfaced later in the new guise of the twentieth-century colonial developmentalist turn. It is noteworthy that, even though the circumstances were different from those examined by Law, also in this more recent instantiation “development” was introduced as an alternative to forced labor.
Moving closer to the present, Frederick Cooper showed that colonial powers turned to development funded through national taxation when they needed to “find a progressive basis for continued colonial rule in an era when major powers had made ‘self-determination’ a slogan of international politics.”Footnote 42 Initially rooted in the reconfiguration of colonial rule that followed the Second World War, planned development increasingly shaped international relations. This developmentalism was a genuinely global governmental regime. It was premised on the idea that powerful nations ought to contribute to the development of poor nations. Not only did it operate on a global scale, but it also derived its legitimacy, procedures, and main ideas from the work of multilateral institutions. It was a constitutive part of the internationalism that has been seen as a distinctive feature of twentieth-century world politics.Footnote 43
Organizations that implemented “development” multiplied: the League of Nations, International Labour Organisation, the various organs of the United Nations system, and the Bretton Woods institutions, for example, monitored and shaped distinct spheres of imperial, at first, and then national governance. Following Truman's Point Four Program (1949), the logic of the Marshall Plan in Europe was extended to include aid to Third World countries.Footnote 44 In the Cold War period, the USSR and China offered African countries development models that they presented as an alternative to that of Western former colonial empires. As mentioned, the idea of modernization was instrumentalized by African nationalist politicians in the context of the Cold War. In this process of internationalization, development was transformed from an essentially political relation between the colonial state and its colonies, to a generalized rationale aimed at redressing the problems of “underdeveloped” countries.Footnote 45 Unlike colonial states, aid donors were neither accountable to recipient countries nor harmed by the failure of aid policies.Footnote 46 Development programs were inhabited by “experts,” “extension workers,” “peasants,” “producers,” “the poor”… these terms emphasized the developer–developed relation, conceptualized in technical rather than political terms.
Although they lacked the accountability of political institutions, development projects assumed many of the state's functions as the main purveyors of public services and infrastructure. They were, too, amongst the very few suppliers of formal employment opportunities to hinterland regions. Landing a job as technical officer, extensionist, or driver in an externally funded development project became one of the main attractions of development for many young professional Africans. This cohort of aspiring aid workers had, and has, to reproduce the logics of the developmentalist apparatus. Like the chiefs in the colonial projects described in this issue, they continue to act today as brokers between donors and “beneficiaries.” For southern aid workers, like for more highly paid consultants in the North, retaining their jobs is conditioned upon the continuous formulation of demands for more development by “beneficiaries” allegedly willing to participate.Footnote 47 Although this outcome may be unintentional, or possibly altogether paved with good intentions,Footnote 48 the creation of employment for providers of aid rests on the representation of beneficiaries as in need of aid and ready to participate.Footnote 49 This obfuscates their identity as workers.
The articles in this special issue cut across the colonial/postcolonial divide. They show that “beneficiaries” were rarely imagined as potentially self-ruling workers. This finding is not intended to idealize the ideology of workfare in opposition to the dependency produced by developmentalist discourse.Footnote 50 Contributions to this issue show unambiguously that the idea of free work as a symbol of civilization for groups defined as backwards and “not ready for freedom” was used to discipline African workers under colonial rule and justify labor coercion as necessary training. Readiness to volunteer work in colonial development schemes was described as yet another proof of advancement. In its nationalist manifestations, developmentalism made “working for development” a requirement of civic participation in national reconstruction. Citizenship required forced volunteering, and development work was rhetorically construed as an activity that would yield returns to the workers, their communities, and the nation. According to paternalist governments and donors, such returns ought to be desired over and above paid employment.
This special issue criticizes the discourses of free labor and development, but does not denounce them as irremediably compromised: Doing as much would amount to approaching these discourses as monolithic endeavors, which they never were. Yet the research featured in this issue shows that developmentalism safeguarded the interests of groups who occupied positions of power in legal and political institutions, and who used their power to make institutions work to their advantage.Footnote 51 This issue suggests that the labor conditions and relations engendered by development policies must be scrutinized closely. It reveals perhaps unexpected continuities between slavery, forced labor, and “development.” Since developmentalism has not ended, these findings raise questions about the ongoing outcomes of “development” for African workers.
Unanswered Questions: Developmentalism into the Present
Development discourse defines and regulates labor relations through a particular logic predicated upon the will to improve. This establishes a power relationship between developers and beneficiaries that endows the former with substantial control over the latter. To be sure, developers and beneficiaries are internally diverse categories: different groups fall under these labels at different moments. Roles ranging from Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, to President for Sustainable Development in the World Bank, to expert consultants in the many companies and organizations that facilitate the delivery of aid programs, to local extensionists in African villages, are only a few of the roles available to those whose task is to develop places or people. Beneficiaries, too, include entire states, regions, communities, or groups defined according to various criteria (e.g., Sahelians, women, HIV-positive individuals, etc.) What they share is that they or the places they inhabit are portrayed as susceptible to improvement. They figure as the targets of development interventions, and they are usually expected to participate in these interventions.
The forms that participation takes vary depending on the specific nature of a development program or project. What concerns us here is how people's participation in development affects their experience of work and employment opportunities: When, if at all, are they paid for participating in their own development? Who is paid and who isn't? How is participation valued in monetary and non-monetary terms? How is it regulated, legally? What forms does participation take? Who has access to different positions as developer, who has access to different positions as beneficiary, and with what consequences, in terms of opportunities for social and economic mobility?
Developmentalism today continues to generate employment for a vast range of people. The beneficiaries of these policies—the poor, the underdeveloped, those below $1.90/day, etc. – are not usually perceived as workers even when their participation entails activities that in other contexts would be characterized as work and remunerated accordingly. The development studies literature sometimes examines the linkages between aid, growth, and employment in Africa.Footnote 52 Most of this literature focuses on what development aid should do to support jobs creation in different sectors of African economies.Footnote 53 But development does not only support jobs creation. In some African contexts today, development is one of very few—if not the only—purveyor of formal employment to those qualified to act as aid workers. All categories of development workers depend on there being a corresponding category of people who can be represented as in need of aid, and who are hardly ever imagined as actual or potential workers.
Beneficiaries are expected to demonstrate the importance they attach to development by contributing something to aid projects and programs. In the past, this something has often been the beneficiaries’ work. But from the perspective of international donors today, unlike colonial administrators, the beneficiaries’ participation is not primarily meaningful because it yields un-paid labor in the target region or country. The beneficiaries’ demand for aid does, however, justify the production and reproduction of jobs for those qualified to act as developers.Footnote 54 Some of these jobs are highly remunerated expatriate positions and consultancies. Others fill the offices of institutions based in places like Geneva, where workers benefit from privileges such as fiscal relief and subsidized access to insurance. Still others are less highly-paid jobs in myriads of NGOs and other South-based development offices. These are desirable positions for professional Africans, many of whom hold or seek degrees in Development Studies. Even so-called beneficiaries, whose participation has opportunity costs and does not result in stable incomes, see aid projects as desirable because they yield revenues and networking opportunities.
Official development agencies collect large amounts of data and statistics, most of which are freely accessible on their websites. This is a valuable service. But in examining this data, it is still hard to come by information on what may be called the labor ratio or wage ratio of Official Development Assistance and NGO funding. We can refer to this as the Development Assistance Wage Ratio (DAWR): What proportion of yearly ODA budgets is spent for wages? What does one find when DAWR data are broken down by nationality of employees and level of remuneration? How does the DAWR of national donor country agencies (e.g., DFID, GTZ, USAID) compare to that of international development organizations (e.g., FAO, WFP), and of NGOs? The importance of these questions is apparent when one stops thinking of the relations instantiated under developmentalism as relations between developers and people-to-be-developed, and rather thinks of them as relations between employers and employees. This special issue reconstructs the initial stages of this unfinished history.
