Technical knowledge and development. Observing aid projects and processes, Thomas Grammig (2002), London/New York: Routledge
✍ Scribed by Willem Koot
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 20 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0969-5931
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Halfway through the nineteen-nineties, the Dutch parliament urged the minister of Development Co-ordination to call for a critical external investigation into the state of affairs concerning the evaluations of development projects. There existed general doubt whether the evaluations, on which 10 million euros were spent annually, do in fact propose something that leads to an improvement in these projects.
When this reviewer was approached by the ministry to lead this meta evaluation investigation, I agreed on the condition that the organizational context in which the evaluation would take place (including the organizational culture of the ministry) should be included in the investigation design. After various pleas, they agreed to my condition. This agreement, however, later seemed merely pacifying because when the minister received my critical [evaluation] report about the role of the organizational culture, he suddenly announced an embargo. It was and still is not customary, not only in the Netherlands, but in virtually all the donor countries, to look into the (informal) organizational aspects of the development co-operation and to provide a critical reflection on their own role.
Thomas Grammig's book, Technological knowledge and development, deals with this practice and its causes. His analysis is based on numerous years of experience in different countries as both a technologist and an anthropologist. Exactly this combination of disciplinary backgrounds gives the analysis depth and persuasion. He knows what he is talking about, provides numerous examples from the daily practice and in this way succeeds to do justice to the 'inner-perspective'. The constitution of the book is as follows.
Grammig starts with an introductory chapter dealing with the development in thinking about technology transfer and then exposes through two cases (one project in Chad and one in Mexico) the extent to which this transmission is influenced by all kinds of cultural, identity-and power processes. The western aid workers frequently feel themselves superior, although they usually send out other messages. Moreover, the communication between the developers and their counterparts is also strongly influenced by the historically growing relationship between the two countries and the discourses that have developed about skin colour and ethnicity. Resultantly, in chapter 2, he ponders why the established development anthropology has