Robert Ahearne

MA Development Studies (Distinction), University of Manchester, 2006.
BA Economics and Sociology (First Class), University of the West of England, Bristol, 2005.

Understanding contemporary development: Tanzanian life narratives of intervention.

Supervisors: Professor Uma Kothari and Dr Sarah Bracking.

Tanzania, East Africa, Life/Alternative Histories of D/development, Development Geographies, Participatory Development, Postcolonial Politics, Critical Anthropology.

In my doctoral research I aim to investigate alternative histories and understandings of development by interviewing older people in South-Eastern Tanzania. Building on work which started in geography and anthropology and focuses on the ways in which development discourse is appropriated and ‘re-worked’, I intend to illustrate that individuals on the ‘receiving end’ of development interventions are not necessarily passive in the process, as some critical and post-development scholars claim. With this in mind, I am researching alternative and personal life histories of ‘development’ (what I call ‘life narratives of intervention’) in South-Eastern Tanzania, in part using a life history methodology. This approach opens up a space in which individuals and groups in three rural villages, through interviews and focus groups, can offer their understandings of major processes over the past fifty years or so, from colonialism, through ujamaa, to the contemporary post-socialist era and, not least, the proliferation of NGOs and the neoliberalization of development theory and policy.

In spite of recent shifts towards participation and so-called ‘people-centred’ development approaches, the opinions, understandings and views of people on the receiving end of development interventions, whether local, regional, national or international are still too rarely considered. Notwithstanding this, regular claims to participation in development are made, with participation strategies largely co-opted into a depoliticized mainstream of development theory and policy. Participation represents but the most recent fad in development theory and is part of a longer genealogy of terms and approaches, especially in Tanzania political discourse, which I intend to investigate further in my fieldwork.

Relevant Work History

Breakfast Club Tanzania, Chief Researcher and NGO Project Manager - January to August 2007.

Funding

University of Manchester Alumni Fund Scholarship.