The Struggle for Development Resources: Case Studies of Elite Capture and Community Empowerment Via Unconditional Direct Transfers to Malian Communities

Summary

Local empowerment movement is a core element of development research and policy agendas. I conducted ethnographies of unconditional Community-Driven Development (CDD) projects in Mali while simultaneously exploring how power struggles shape the concepts and knowledge that we use to consider local empowerment and elite capture. I found that the elite capture critique is a form of symbolic power that legitimizes top-down control over development resources. Unconditional CDD can catalyze endogenous institutional change by creating ‘a distinct social space’ where actors draw upon modern and traditional discourses in the struggle over resources, institutions, and meanings. CDD could achieve enduring forms of social change when it builds off local women’s practical knowledge and supports them in the struggles they are willing to fight. Rather than imposing social organization, development institutions should shift to allow and study local empowerment. This knowledge could legitimize the devolution of development resources because this is how durable social change is produced.