In her first book, political scientist Erin Beck sets out to offer “a corrective” to “simplistic views of development interventions” (15) and the “caricatures of the people involved” (14). She adopts an “agent-based approach” to explore development projects as “socially constructed,” with NGO staff and funders as well as beneficiaries all “strategiz[ing], negotiat[ing], and collud[ing] … in pursuit of their projects” (15). Beck argues that researchers and practitioners alike would do well to conceptualize development not as a form of northern intervention in the Global South, but rather as “a set of relationships being worked out on uneven terrain characterized by inherent tensions and navigated by people using different conceptual and experiential maps” (209). Development projects persist and even “thrive,” Beck asserts, precisely because of these tensions (223). All parties involved—including supposedly passive recipients—are “socially embedded actors” who “transform projects in unexpected ways” (209), “assign multiple meanings and goals” to projects, and, in the end, frame projects “as successful even if they fail to develop communities or countries” (223).

The bulk of the text provides a unique and thorough treatment of two nongovernmental development organizations operating in Guatemala: Namaste and Fraternidad de Presbiteriales Mayas (the Fraternity). Although both groups target women in their development efforts, they have adopted different organizational models and approaches to development. Chapters 3 and 5 lay out the particulars of each organization, and chapters 4 and 6 examine the interactions between each NGO and its beneficiaries, with special attention to the beneficiaries’ perceptions and uses of the organization.

This core is framed by two introductory chapters, one exploring development work as “social engineering” and the other setting the context of development projects in Guatemala since the late 1990s. A concluding chapter urges scholars and practitioners to move beyond “single-loop learning” and adopt a more critical and creative approach to development work (223–24). The book also includes an appendix in which Beck describes her research methods in more detail and explores some of the ethical dilemmas she faced while working on this project. Although the overarching arguments of this book are not entirely new and some readers may find the text to be repetitive at times, the strong ethnographic work at the heart of this study will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and practitioners concerned with the local and gendered dynamics of development projects, and the work of small development organizations in Guatemala and beyond.