DISJUNCTURES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: MAKING SENSE OF CHANGE IN AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT AT THE OFFICE DU NIGER, 1920–60

In the introduction to their edited volume International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard take on the thorny question of why development policies change and why they sometimes persist or reappear after a period of dormancy. Much recent scholarship has located the reasons for persistence or change in development approaches within international institutions such as multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and Western scientific and social scientific disciplines. Both Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson argue for the existence of a hegemonic development discourse with standardized interventions aimed at ‘solving’ homogenized ‘problems’. Grounded in Western institutions such as the World Bank, this development discourse is maintained by an interlocked network of experts and expertise. In their analyses, development approaches and interventions are minimally affected by the particularities of locale. Other scholars concerned with identifying and understanding significant change in development policy have also focused their studies on Western organizations and disciplines and excluded from their analysis the role that development practice might play in change. But Cooper and Packard challenge scholars to consider the ways in which development policies might be molded by the practice of development, when they note ‘it is not clear that the determinants of these policies are as independent of what goes on at the grassroots as they appear to their authors or their critics to be’.