Power and Partnership

This article challenges intercultural partnerships, especially those instituted by Christians and churches across the cultural divide between Africa and the West, that can become a means of exploitation, of limiting people’s freedom, and of introducing and encouraging corruption. The author observes a massive influence on African communities by the West. Material and financial dependency discourages speaking out against a system that orients communities towards the pleasing of foreigners even when what the latter bring is neither understood or in some ways desired. Definitions of ‘success’ have in parts of Africa become integrally linked to the pleasing of donors. Three case-studies illustrate outcomes of foreign donor-based partnerships. This article advocates for the institution of some partnerships, focusing especially on Western and African churches, that are rooted other than in the superior languages and resources of the West.

Sustainable Development, 2009

2020

Third World Quarterly, 2007

The Ecumenical Review, 2016

Ecumenical Review, 2016

The past decade has witnessed a surge of scholarly interest into the relationships between religion and development with significant attention being given to Christian actors. Recent studies have examined the vast array of ‘development‐type’ activities carried out by Christian organisations in health, education, poverty alleviation, refugee services, disaster relief etc. Transnational Christian service is a powerful dynamic shaping social imaginaries and development outcomes. Anthropology has been at the forefront of this emerging scholarship, helpfully illuminating the deep histories of Christian involvement in development and furnishing textured analyses of diverse Christian missionary and non‐governmental actors. Also of direct relevance is the widely‐heralded ‘return of theology’ in which theological concerns are again being located at the centre of academic enquiry. Various approaches to analysing the theological, including particularly ‘political’ and ‘practical’ concerns, are making incisive interventions into development debates. This symposium builds upon emerging anthropological and theological research on the entanglements between Christianity and development. It seeks to further expand the horizons of scholarly debate by attending to both theologies and practices. We aim to open new lines of enquiry by asking: How have interactions between Christianity and development reshaped each other? What are the genealogical and historical connections between various Christian traditions and the values, formations and practices of mainstream international development? What tensions have arisen between Christian and development (and within Christian development) actors and what do these reveal about the nature of development today? What directions should anthropological and theological analysis take in future research on development? Short provocations by leading scholars from anthropology and theology will help facilitate a broad‐ranging interdisciplinary conversation which will open new spaces for rethinking analytical frameworks and move the debate about Christianity and development into new questions and arenas.

International Affairs, 2020

In this article, drawing on the work of the development sociologist Norman Long, I make the case for an actor-oriented approach to understanding the ‘turn to religion’ by global aid actors over the past couple of decades. I ask, is the ‘turn to religion’ evidence of the emergence of post-secular partnerships or are faith actors being instrumentalized to serve neo-liberal development goals? I argue that neither option captures the whole story and advocate that the study of religion and development needs to move beyond a binary between the ‘turn to religion’ as either evidence of post-secular partnerships or of the ‘instrumentalization’ of religion by the secular global aid business, and instead to think about how faith actors themselves encounter and shape development discourses and frameworks, translate them into relevant formats and strategically employ them. Alongside the adoption of an actor-orientated approach, I build on the work of Lewis and Mosse, Olivier de Sardan and Biersc...

2005

Progress in Development Studies , 2019

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.