In Conversation with Liz Fouksman: Civil Society Knowledge Networks
The DSA, alongside Oxford University Press, publishes the DSA-OUP book series: Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research and Practice in International Development Studies. The series aims to promote critical scholarship in development studies as an interdisciplinary and applied field. The latest author in the series is Liz Fouksman with her book on Civil Society Knowledge Networks: International Development and the Globalization of Ideas.
Development has long been shaped by debates around knowledge and ideas. Where do the concepts underpinning international development come from? Who generates and promotes them — and why? Do ideas really shape development practice, or does the sector continue business-as-usual while conceptual trends come and go? And crucially, how do these ideas influence broader societal worldviews? These are the questions explored in Liz Fouksman’s new book, which makes three key arguments, the overarching argument being that development institutions are a force of epistemic globalisation. “Development organisations create civil society knowledge networks that shape and propagate ideas. But this is not a one-way flow from global foundations to local communities,” she explains.
“Local communities have a great deal of agency, and they often reshape these ideas in very strategic ways to meet local needs. For example, I worked with a community in Kyrgyzstan that needed a canal. They were able to reshape that need to fit a climate change adaptation programme. Not cynically — they weren’t against climate change adaptation — but they adapted these global ideas to fit local priorities.”
“At the same time, global foundations are deeply invested in finding local authenticity. Even though they have resources and material power, that power is moderated by their desire for authentic local voices. That creates opportunities for local activists to strategically navigate global development spaces and access new resources and forms of influence.” ”.
Her third argument is about the state. “I argue that development both depoliticises and creates new forms of political engagement. It tones down confrontation, but also enables forms of engagement with the state that weren’t previously possible.”
The empirical research was conducted in the 2010s, and Liz explains how the sector has changed and the research’s relevance within that. “When I first started this research project, it was during a moment when globalisation was a huge topic. Global studies programmes were emerging, and it felt like the world was knitting together rapidly. Now we’re in a much more oppositional political moment. Globalisation is viewed with suspicion across the political spectrum. So the book has become an interesting case study of how globalisation continues to happen despite that.”
“Development organisations are still going into local communities, running projects, sharing ideas, giving money, and learning from local activists. These processes are still very much ongoing. What’s interesting is that people often don’t think about these processes as global epistemic forces shaping and knitting together worldviews.”
Her book is a critical one for scholars of civil society in the development sector, because it engages with, adds nuance to and complicates some canonical arguments, such as James Ferguson’s argument in The Anti-Politics Machine about development civil society being depoliticising.
“I found that development civil society can depoliticise in some ways,” she explains. “I worked with former activists who had once been very confrontational with the state, and through engagement with the development sector they became less confrontational. But at the same time, they gained tools that enabled them to make claims on the state in new ways. Rather than confronting the state directly, they learned to work through state mechanisms to access resources or gain control over land.”
She gives the example of one of her key interlocutors in Kenya who had been a very confrontational land rights activist. “Through engagement with international foundations, he learned how to access state resources through the Kenyan Wildlife Service to help communities develop community forestry initiatives in a way that was no longer confrontational but nevertheless increased local autonomy and accessed state resources.”
The book also looks at how global foundations increasingly celebrate local knowledge and authenticity, but often in extractivist ways. The book thus examines how global foundations inadvertently influence the ways NGOs and grassroots activists behave in order to access funding and resources
“One activist I worked with in Kenya never really thought of himself as an Indigenous elder. But he realised that if he presented himself that way — which wasn’t inauthentic, because he was both Indigenous and an elder — he could access different forums, resources, and global platforms like UN summits in ways he couldn’t as a land rights activist.
The book is also intended to be useful for development practitioners and those in civil society. The introduction and conclusion, which pull out the core arguments, are written in an accessible literary style. The central sections go deeper into the empirical detail and contain extensive quotes and narratives from the people Liz worked with, organised around local activists, in-country NGOs, and major global foundations.
The writing process
The book was a long time in the making. While it originated inLiz’s PhD research, Liz took a long break from the topic, developing a second major research project on moral attachment to labour in southern Africa, before coming back to the manuscript years later.
“There was definitely a period where I told myself that something had to get written every day. It didn’t matter what it was or what quality it was – at least a page had to happen. There was a phase where it was just: words on page, words on page, words on page.”
“Then I took a long break and came back to edit it. Taking a break can be problematic because the field moves on, but it was also really useful to get distance from the project. When I reread it years later, I suddenly realised what the three key arguments actually were. That’s when I rewrote the beginning and end of the book.”
Her advice for aspiring authors? “Don’t lose momentum. I lost momentum for a few years. In some ways that helped because I came back to the work with fresh eyes, but it also dragged the process out much longer than necessary.”
“I wish I’d imposed the same discipline on editing that I did on drafting – something like editing ten pages a day.”
“I was very lucky to have friends and colleagues willing to read parts of the manuscript. That helped enormously because writing a book can be such an alienating and lonely process. Being in conversation with other people is really key.”
Drawing on the energy of her fieldwork was also critical. “This was a deeply empirical project, and that fieldwork generated so much of the energy for the book. I don’t think I could have sustained the energy to write it without that fieldwork element, because I found it so fascinating and energising. Sometimes when I was losing steam with the writing, I would go back and look at my fieldwork photos just to remember what it felt like to be there.”