Grounded in long-term field research, Richard's ethnography of Hidalgo Development, an NGO operating in the Tulancingo valley, combines the virtues of intensive ethnographic engagement with a perceptive historical perspective on how the changing projects of this organisation reflected national and global transformations. The ethnography is revealing, exploring the delicate relations between local campesinos and people working in the NGO and treating both with an empathy that does not inhibit critical distance. For example, Richard records the contradictions which led a campesina who asked her to take a photograph of the family milpa (cropping field) that she could send to her granddaughter in the United States – ‘so that she remembers who she is’ – to insist that the girl would never return to Mexico and that there would be no more campesinos after the passing on of her own generation (p. 114). Climate change is increasing rural–urban and international migration, but the book's third chapter shows how these peasants’ insistence that the countryside has ‘dried up’ rejects efforts to naturalise a governmental disaster.

What makes this book an outstanding anthropological contribution is its rigorous analysis of the cultural processes that accompanied the global NGO boom of the neoliberal era, with its emphasis on ‘cultivation’ as a conceptual metaphor ‘for the construction of subjects, institutions, organizations, and practices proper to particular visions of citizenship and civic life’ (p. 22). Richard draws in an historically contextualised way on anthropological classics such as Eric Wolf's work on peasant communities, patron–client relations and the role of caciques as culture brokers. She also considers insights from George Foster in the discussion in Chapter 5 of how Hidalgo Development, acting as a cultural mediator, uses compadrazgo relations to forge transnational ‘bridges of love’ between campesino families and foreign sympathisers, recognising the limits of this kind of transnational solidarity whilst refusing simply to debunk it. Mexican scholars such as Claudio Lomnitz and Guillermo de la Peña, who represent a new generation building on Wolf's legacy, also figure prominently, alongside a wide range of anthropological efforts to understand neoliberal governmentality as a path-dependent process. Richard also incorporates ideas from Bruno Latour in conceptualising the NGO form as a ‘quasi-object’, something that reciprocally influences the behaviour and worldview of the actors who produce it once they put it to use. Her understanding of globalisation and the formation of transnational networks draws inspiration from Anna Tsing's account of how universals, such as human rights, can be turned into ‘practical projects accomplished in a heterogeneous world’ only through cultural work enacted ‘in the sticky materiality of practical encounters’ (p. 126, pp. 149–50). The discussion of all these cultural processes is firmly embedded in a holistic account of the interrelationships between economic, political and socio-cultural change that highlights the dilemmas change presents to all actors.

The book begins with an historical analysis of the meaning of citizenship to rural Mexicans under the ‘old’ and ‘new’ liberalisms that provides a framework for understanding the development of the Third Sector in the Tulancingo Valley. If the violence and extortion of the Zetas cartel revived negative images of rural Hidalgo as a place of abject victims and violent aggressors rather modern citizens in a context in which a neoliberalised elite had already declared the campesino economy an anachronism, Richard's account of the emergence of Hidalgo Development in the late 1970s takes us back to a previous era. At that time, the threat posed by agrarian insurgency and business distaste for state policies of land redistribution and collectivisation provided an opening for private-sector sponsorship of projects orientated to alleviation of poverty and promotion of peasant entrepreneurship. Hidalgo Development emerged in a deeply reactionary regional context, with backing from the regional bosses of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). Although the tightfistedness of the local elite provoked conflicts with the NGO organisers, real successes were achieved in boosting peasant productivity, with growing support from US foundations. Yet the NGO promoters became concerned that their ‘cultivation’ of entrepreneurial campesinos was destroying the practices of solidarity that dominated their mythologised understanding of the ‘cultural value of campesinos to the nation's historical project’ (p. 77). A refocusing of activity on education and building cooperation drew the NGO away from elite philanthropy towards Liberation Theology and a project of building solidarity between the rural and urban poor. This approach was increasingly orientated to rights-based demands and the national and transnational networks associated with the Zapatistas in the 1990s. Yet deepening rural crisis and neoliberal dismantling of the institutions that organised the post-revolutionary countryside left financially-challenged NGOs trying to repair the social fabric through public–private partnerships, whilst facing growing dilemmas resulting from the need to charge peasants for services and the risks of political co-optation when government agencies were looking to ‘boost statistical indicators of rural well-being’ (p. 92). Chapter 4 focuses on the period after Mexico's illusory ‘democratic transition’, revealing the increasingly ‘unsettled’ way in which NGOs have responded to changing constraints and opportunities. It offers a trenchant critique of the systems of regulation that the Fox and Calderón administrations imposed on the Third Sector and of the return to a paternalistic charitable approach represented by the Vamos México NGO established by Fox's wife Marta Sahagún. Richard highlights the downsides of corporate philanthropisation of NGOs, and recognises that the NGOs’ ability to ‘cultivate’ small changes – which might help to create alternative futures – results from their ‘connectivity and cultural intimacy with the forces of state and capital’ (p. 180); she thereby shows how the reframing of the dispossession provoked by today's models of accumulation as a social rather than political issue has undermined rights-based approaches, ‘naturalizing the abjection’ of the rural poor. Her argument is not totally pessimistic. She recognises the more substantive kind of humanitarianism promoted by the cultural work of NGO activists in building networked solidarities. But it remains satisfyingly realistic in the light of the further catastrophes that followed the PRI's recapture of the presidency.