ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2005

In association with Development Policy and Practice and the International Development Centre at the Open University

Milton Keynes, UK
7th-9th September 2005

Connecting people and places: challenges and opportunities for development

SPECIAL PARALLEL SESSION ON PAROCHIALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN DEVELOPMENT ENCOUNTERS
OUTLINE AND ABSTRACTS

Panel convenors:

• Uma Kothari, IDPM, Manchester University
• Giles Mohan, DPP, The Open University

Development processes have always involved encounters between different people in different places. The power relations, assumptions, and practices bound up in these shape the direction and content of the resulting development processes. When these encounters have been analysed they have largely been represented in dichotomous terms such as donor/beneficiary; expert/indigenous; First/Third world, home/away, global/local; developed/developing. And even when they are understood relationally the constituent parts tend to remain discreet and, in some cases, are reified. In this session we wish to challenge the apparent parochialism and cosmopolitanism that underlie these distinctions and work productively with the blurring of these dichotomies.

Cosmopolitanism has re-entered social science debate after being dismissed as elitist and/or hopelessly utopian. We feel it has much to offer contemporary development studies, since it can illuminate processes of cultural contact, knowledge and power. However, our approach differs from existing approaches to migration and development as well as some of the more orthodox readings of cosmopolitanism.

First, when we study migration it tends to be in terms of flows of labour, expertise, and skills in which only certain forms of knowledge are valued. Additionally, the content and direction of the flow and its value are ascribed a priori; for example, remittances to kin. Rather what we want to explore is how these flows are constructed and imagined? Second, cosmopolitanism has assumed certain forms of mobility, in which an encounter with the West and elite types of meetings are privileged. We are interested in examining forms of cosmopolitanism that are acquired through other forms of encounters – those that are non-elite, involve other knowledges and are South-South.

In these sessions we challenge assumptions about who are cosmopolitans (and who are not), and open up questions about what knowledges constitute worldliness, and by implication what capabilities are necessary to operate in a globalised world.

Session themes

There are two key themes we wish to explore:

• Travelling parochialism/Cosmopolitanism in place
• Non-elite cosmpolitanisms

Travelling parochialism/Cosmopolitanism in place
Arjun Appadurai refers to the world of flows, where people, goods, images, ideas and capital circulate. We are concerned with how these flows 'touch' ground in terms of development encounters. Particularly, we welcome papers reflecting on 'the field' when development experts, either on fleeting consultancies or in slightly more 'embedded' projects, encounter 'the locals'. This is usually presented as the ‘local’ beneficiary, untravelled and 'trapped' in place, confronting the mobile, 'worldy' expert. But who is the parochial and who is cosmopolitan in the encounter? What do they each take away from the encounter? Does it reinforce the parochialism of the expert at the same time as producing a cosmopolitan ‘other’?

Another consequence of Appadurai's flows is how the apparently pristine and unworldy local is unintentionally empowered through these flows and encounters. Do we see 'local recipients’ as well versed in the machinery, tools, language and discourses of development? Is this a genuine participatory dialogue and to what extent does it allow the 'locals' to stealthily claim a space, while playing into the vanity of the 'outside' expert? In what ways do the 'recipients' become familiar with how to perform to outsiders and to act like recipients? And what power relations do such encounters reveal and how do they shape development practice on the ground?

Non-elite cosmopolitanisms
A dominant assumption of cosmopolitanism is that it relates to the mobile and wealthy global flaneur, able to tread delicately and knowingly within and between cultures. What this ignores is the savvy and strategic way in which non-elites negotiate the globe. Here we are interested in the 'expert' working class migrant who are able to manoeuvre themselves with apparent ease in different environments, relying on a range of tacit skills, expertise and connections. How do they create, exist in, and invoke these global networks? When and how do they use their expertise and skills? What happens to those who do not ‘survive’ and what does this tell us about these skills and expertise?

However, the social process of displaying a different form of cosmopolitanism involves producing and using contacts and associations based on religion, race, ethnicity or tribe. Thus, to what extent does this form of cosmopolitanism work through and reinforce forms of parochialism and blur the dichotomous distinctions between cosmopolitan and parochial? Furthermore, how are these distinctions challenged as entrenched flows of migrants build up extended contacts over space and time leading to loyalties and allegiances?

Papers

COSMOPOLITAN STATES OF DEVELOPMENT: HOMELANDS, CITIZENSHIPS, AND DIASPORIC GHANAIAN POLITICS
Giles Mohan, Development Policy and Practice Department, The Open University

The paper examines the tension between national identity and other forms of attachment inherent in cosmopolitanism. It concerns the actually existing cosmopolitanism of lived interdependencies as opposed to normative, Kantian ideals. The emphasis within cosmopolitanism of thinking and feeling beyond the nation potentially ignores the ways in which states facilitate and exploit such attachments. Rather, mobile, open and dynamic identities are implicated in nationalism rather than standing in a teleological or zero-sum relationship to it, whereby cosmopolitan identities replace national ones. I examine these issues through the case of Ghana and the Ghanaian Diaspora.

Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s there was large-scale out-migration from Ghana, creating what has been termed a neo-diaspora. The migrants have mainly settled in cities in Western Europe and North America where they have developed institutional networks linking them to other diasporic locations and Ghana. These migrants have complex identities forged from multiple meetings in numerous places. Some of these are rooted in hometown, clan and family attachments and the obligations this brings. While the tendency is to see them as forms of ethnicity they are much more fluid than this. The current government (in line with many developing countries) is making a major play to ‘harness’ the diaspora for political support and inward investment, marked by such events as the 2002 Homecoming Summit. Tensions are being played out about dual-citizenship and whether the migrants’ economic commitments to Ghana are matched by rights as full citizens. The Ghana government has to tread a careful path between attracting investment and garnering the right sort of political support, since people in the diaspora often have an ambivalent relationship to domestic politics.

One of the vehicles through which the Ghanaian state seeks to square this is through encouraging hometown associations in various cities in the global North to fund development at the local level through various local-local partnerships; something highly formalised in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Hence, the nation, the national good, and development are being promoted through particularistic ethnic and locality based organisations, which brings to light multiple and overlapping homelands and citizenships. For the migrants they may experience quasi-citizenship in two states; racism in the recipient state and limited rights in Ghana. Their liminality means they never really get protection or the conferral of rights anywhere and, therefore, seek privatised ways of managing risk. The question is whether this is a form of emergent cosmopolitan nationalism or simply a means of averting a rationality crisis by finding new ways of funding welfare and promoting self-governance in the context of neoliberal roll-back.

The other presenters are:

• Uma Kothari, IDPM,University of Manchester
• Nina Laurie, Department of Geography, University of Newcastle
• Rory Stanton, PhD Student, IDPM, University of Manchester
  

Page last updated: 19 August, 2005