(Assignment 3) Sardan Ch. 11: Mediations and Brokerage - Amrithavarshini V

1.     Development, in its operational form (the everyday activities of a technical service or the project routine), invariably passes through the hands of development agents who constitute the inevitable interface between an intervention and those to whom it is destined – The names given to these development agents vary according to their field of intervention and their competence (and even, at times, according to trends or doctrines): primary healthcare agents, nurses, midwives, in the health sector; supervisors, extension workers, agricultural advisers, rural social workers, in the field of rural development. Literacy workers, social workers, educators, workers in animal husbandry and veterinary assistants could also be mentioned.

2.     My main hypothesis is that the development agent assumes a double function: he or she is the spokesperson on behalf of technical– scientific knowledge and the mediator between technical–scientific knowledge and popular knowledge.

3.     It is not just a matter of finding the most appropriate Fulani or Wolof word for ‘fertilizer’, ‘diarrhoea’, or ‘investment’: translation in the full sense of the word is not merely an exercise that consists in finding the equivalent of a given word in another person’s natural language, it also involves bringing two different semantic fields, two distinct ways of dissecting or of perceiving reality into relationship with one another.

4.     Seen from this point of view, a lexical notion of translation makes very little sense, and the anthropological problematic in this domain has more in common with semiology than with linguistics, and Regardless of the choice of media, and whether the developer speaks the developee’s language or not, the problem surrounding the transmission of a ‘technical message’ still amounts to the inevitable confrontation between two systems of meaning. The development agent finds him/herself at the centre of this confrontation.

5.     In this respect, development agents must assume three functions; an almost impossible task that entails an accumulation of contradictions and ambiguity. They must:

a.     defend their own personal interests,

b.     defend the interests of their institution,

c.     mediate between various actors’interests and those of local factions …

Seen in the light of this ‘mission impossible’, the development agent seems to be a very special actor in the local arena

6.     However, one aspect of the ‘crisis of the African state’ is related to the fact that African states are currently incapable of siphoning off or of controlling a significant percentage of the cash flowing in, from the North to the South, because of the fact that they fail to inspire confidence in the donors. Thus, the ‘development rent’ transits essentially through national intermediaries, who are separate and distinct from the classic public administrators and political systems.

7.     Hence, the brokerage function can constitute either a complementary resource, as sometimes occurs, or a central resource,and therefore a new centre of local power.It can also serve to consolidate acquired power or open the path to a position of power that was already in existence.