The Afterlives of International Development Interventions: A Site-Specific Ethnographic Approach

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the long-term implications, resonance, and reverberation of international development interventions. Going beyond projects’ official blueprints and stated objectives, scholars and development practitioners alike increasingly approach such interventions as living, complex, and non-linear processes that can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences. In this article, I offer a conceptual guide—reinforced by methodological suggestions—for studying the representational and material ‘afterlives’ of development interventions in the global South, which overflow projects’ official timelines and life cycles. Inspired by phenomenological ideas and by the ‘material turn’ in anthropology, as well as by work on temporality and spatiality, I recognize target populations as repositories of non-hegemonic knowledge, skill, and agency, who creatively re-appropriate development’s remains and legacies. While such local perspectives may have been kept under relative control throughout the project itself, they come to the fore upon the project’s termination, as formal scripts loosen their grip. The result is a cumulative, site-specific, and grassroots-based ethnographical approach aimed at studying post-intervention sites in their totality, with emphasis on the intertwinement of the palimpsest-like multilayers of interventions.