INTERIMREPORTS 2014
GLOBAL MICRO IN THE MAKING – MARKETIZATION
OF WEATHER
Marc Boeckler & Katharina Abdo (Frankfurt)
ORGANISATION (FORMALIA)
Project title
Global Micro in the Making: The Marketization of Weather Index Insurance
for Agriculture in Ghana
Home
Institution
Department of Human Geography, Goethe-University Frankfurt
Research area
Ghana, World (various locations)
Starting date
April 2013
Investigators
Prof. Dr. Marc Boeckler
Dipl.-Geogr. Katharina Abdo (April 2013 until March 2014)
Project is currently on hold. Katharina terminated her contract at the end of March 2013.
Research will resume in August 2014.
Presentations
“Vom Labor ins Feld: Ökonomische In-Vivo Experimente”. Presentation at
the Conference “Neue Kulturgeographie”, Leipzig, Januar 2013
“Human Weather and Natural Calculation: Weather Index Insruance for
Small-Scale Farmers”. Presentation at the Workshop on Critical Climate
Change Scholarship, Minneapolis USA, April 2013
“Marketization, Performation, Experimentation: Climate Change and the
Production of Weather Index Insurance Markets for Small-Scale Farmers”.
Presentation at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
2013, Los Angeles USA, April 2013.
“Vom Labor ins Feld: Ökonomische In-vivo Experimente in Ghana”.
Presentation at the Lecture Series at the Department of Geography,
University of Mainz, May 2013.
Chair and discussant at the session „Ökonomisierte Natur und
kommodifizierte Nachhaltigkeit: Global Change zwischen Marktlogik und
politischer Steuerung“ at the Geographentag, Passau, October 2013.
„Sozio-technische
Experimentierfelder
am
Schnittpunkt
von
Marktintegration und Klimawandel“. Presentation at the Geographentag,
Passau, October 2013.
Workshops
Participation at the SPP Summer School on Crisis, Halle, September 2013
(Katharina Abdo)
SPP Junior-Workshop „Technology and Translation“. Organization and
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participation, Katharina Abdo together with Norman Schraepel and René
Umlauf, January 2014, Rieth.
Difficulties
Due to personal reasons, Katharina Abdo is leaving the project at the end
of March 2014. We hope to find an appropriate replacement as soon as
possible. For the time being, I have asked the DFG to pause the project for
a period of four months (Aussetzung des Projekts von April bis Juli 2014
und kostenneutrale Verlängerung).
Our main empirical research object, the GIZ funded Ghana Agricultural
Insurance Program, will be terminated by July 2014. Therefore we’ve had
the unique opportunity to follow the complete marketization process from
its design and inception to its eventual failure. On the other hand, we would
have very much liked to contrast and compare the empirical insights from
Ghana with a successful project. Consequently we are thinking of
extending the research area to East Africa (Ethiopia or Kenya) in order to
study how global
RESEARCH
1. Research topic and research question
This research project problematizes economic orders by studying the emergence of weatherrelated microinsurance markets. It does so by analyzing the global production of market
models for microinsurance products and their subsequent translation into specific settings in
Ghana. Originally, we were interested in two main research questions:
-
How are global economic orders produced and translated into local settings?
How does the performativity and materiality of economic models and calculative practices
intervene in the production of microinsurance markets?
2. Analytical concepts and methodological approaches
Translation as an analytical concept, that derives from Science and Technology Studies and
Actor-Network Theory, lies at the core of the project. It offers the possibility to analyze how
things are drawn together and is a useful tool to show how the global is constructed via
micro-translations. Indeed, as a modality of economization, marketization can be read as a
radical translation process, one which ensures that economic and social realities are brought
into line with the laboratory conditions of economic modelling, allowing the radical project of
neoclassical economics to realize itself. Following recent theoretical developments in the
social studies of marketization we conceive of markets as socio-technical agencements. A
crucial role in the design of markets and the translational reconfiguration of the social play
various modalities of experimentation.
3. Empirical work
We set apart our topic into three different empirical threads: (1) “Producing global
knowledge” which focuses on the international microinsurance scene; (2) “Localizing” which
takes into account the implementation of an index-based insurance market in Ghana; and (3)
“Translating” which encompasses the analysis of economic experiments with regard to indexbased insurance. Empirical work in the project (so far mostly prior to the current funding
period) has been carried out along these three categories:
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(1) Producing global knowledge: attending international microinsurance conferences and
workshops
FARMD (06/2011, Zürich)
Attending international Microinsurance
conferences; Participatory observation
Katharina
7th International
Microinsurance Conference
(11/2011, Rio de Janeiro)
Participatory observation, e.g. “Scientific Track
– Economic analysis of microinsurance
markets”; „Protecting the poor against natural
disasters“
Katharina
8th International
Microinsurance Conference
(11/2012, Dar el-Salaam)
Participatory observation, e.g. Pre-Conference
on Scientific Evaluation Methodology; Informal
meeting “Index Insurance and Remote
Sensing”; “How to provide sustainable
insurance for low-income farmers”
Katharina
Research workshop on
Microinsurance (12/2012,
Mannheim)
Participatory observation
Katharina
ICMIF Microinsurance
Workshop, India (10/2013)
Participating in the microinsurance simulation
game “Putting Practice into Perspective”;
Participating at an educational microinsurance
game “The Treasure Pott”,
Interviews with NGOS, international
consultants and insurers; Field trip: payout of
insurance; Meeting with farmers that are
clients of weather insurance companies
Katharina
(2) Localizing: case study in Ghana
Ghana: Ashanti Region,
Accra (3/2012)
Qualitative interviews with experts and
practitioners (NGOs, academic consultants,
Meteorological Agency)
Participator observation of the assessment of
weathers stations in the Ashanti Region
Katharina,
Marc
Ghana (7-8/2012)
Interviews with members of the steering
committee (World Bank, financial ministry,
agricultural ministry, farmers association,
scientific consultants)
Marc
Ghana: Accra, Ashanti
Region, Brong Ahafo,
Northern Regions (8-9/2012)
Impact assessment tour with different farmers;
Participating at different trainings (GIS and
Excel) for the technical unit of the Ghana
Agriculture Insurance Program; Interviews with
NGOs and academic consultants
Katharina
(3) Translating: economic experiments
Ghana; Ashanti Region
(11/2012)
Participatory observation of an insurance lab
experiment; framed field experiment in several
villages of the Ashanti Region
Katharina
Experimental Economics,
Goethe-University Frankfurt
(winter term 2012/2013)
Participating and attending the Field Course
“Experimental Economics”
Katharina
CSAE Conference: Economic
Development in Africa
Follow-up interview with the project leader of
the framed field experiment;
Katharina
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(3/2013, Oxford)
Particiaptory observation of various panels
(e.g. “ Risk and Insurance”, Credit, Savings,
Risk and Insurance”).
4. First results
We argue that the empirical research on the making of weather related insurance products
might shed light on basic features of at least three different developments of African
dis/orders: the economization of nature, the making of markets and experimentality as a
general condition of scientific governance of the Global South..
Economization of Nature
The economization of nature plays an important role when it comes to weather-related index
insurance not only on a local basis but also on a global level. First, there are technologies
that consist of calculative devices, which enable the visualization, and hence
problematization of certain topics that in turn are requiring technological solutions and fixes.
Second, there are crisis-related narratives with respect to climate change that are involved in
processes of signification and legitimization. Here, the concept of crisification seems to be an
appropriate starting point for an in-depth analysis of the narratives that sustain index-based
weather insurance. In the following year, we seek to elaborate on these intersectional
threads, which are linked to neoliberalizing/economizing nature in Africa in general.
The making of markets as a constant trial-and-error process: the demand-supply
conundrum
Markets are often defined as the equilibrium of demand and supply, as natural and selforganized entities. The concept of marketization, in contrast, conceives of markets as sociotechnical agencements, as hybrid collectifs, arrangements of heterogeneous elements that
have to be constantly made and sustained and that bring about agency. Microinsurance
provides an interesting insight into the making of new markets. So far, most of the indexbased microinsurance pilots are characterized through a constant trial-and-error process.
On international conferences, development economists repeat frequently that according to
economic theory, it is assumed that poor people display a relatively high-risk aversion;
consequently, demand for insurance among this population group would be high. On the
supply side, the value of a potential micro insurance market in general (including life, health
and agriculture) is estimated between 30 and 50 billion $ annually (Accenture 2012), hence
insurance companies should be eager to offer such products. However, there does not exist
a market for microinsurance yet. Going into the field and considering reality, the vision
becomes a conundrum as a facilitator says right at the beginning of a microinsurance
workshop entitled “Putting Theory into Practice”. Some 16 practitioners, from various NGOs
and insurance companies are gathered. Most of them do confirm the conundrum that is
defined as puzzling state of confusion and difficulty – by sharing anecdotes and experiences
from their own work in the field. Even in subsidized schemes, uptake is low and the initial
optimism has waned, companies are not interested in microinsurance unless they are
obliged to offer such products due to governmental regulations. What to do when there is
neither demand nor supply?
We seek to describe the negotiation and creation of both demand and supply and hence the
making of new markets at various sites and localities (international conferences, national law,
development agencies, banks, insurance companies, weather stations, satellite imagery,
mobile phones, farms etc.).
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Treating the field as a lab: experiments
The making of Microinsurance markets is done through multi-layered experiments. They vary
in scope, design and type: In the Northern Regions IPA runs randomized controlled trials with
3000 farmers, PhD students of economic development organize rather small framed field
experiments in several villages of the Ashanti Region. Educational games and computer
simulation programs are developed and promoted at international workshops. Even though
these examples are quite different with respect to their potential target group, the required
technical devices and their underlying theoretical assumptions they share several
commonalities. First, they are used both as a method for data production and as a learning
tool for scientists, practitioners and potential clients. Second, all of them take place in a
controlled environment or laboratory – the paradigmatic site for the “production of certainty”
(Latour 2002). We are interested in the seam zone of these laboratories and their slippery
boundaries. What does it mean if the field is treated as a lab? Which consequences do these
interventions have with respect to dis/ordering practices? We argue that the mode of
experimentation can be conceived as a methodological tool that furthers the translation of
financial inclusion and of market-making; as such experiments are elements of translational
processes, of the overall “laboratorization” as Callon had put it: “For the world to behave as
in the research laboratory, (…) we simply have to transform the world so that at every
strategic point a ‘replica’ of the laboratory, the site where we can control the phenomena
studied, is placed“ (Callon et al. 2009).
To sum up, current ordering processes such as the economization of nature, market-making
and experimentation are mirrored in the establishment of index-based weather insurance in
Ghana.
5. Specification of research question
Out of our empirical research, two specifications arose: One is rather thematically and
empirically, the other concerns theoretical considerations. First, we have been able to trace
the travelling of global concepts and their translations into a specific local setting in Ghana.
What might be interesting is to see which consequences theses translational processes have
with respect to local ordering processes. To address this question, it would be necessary to
get an insight into agricultural microinsurance schemes that have been implemented for a
longer period than the Ghana Agricultural Insurance Program. Here, a comparative study
with projects in Ethiopia or Kenia might reveal interesting aspects especially with respect to
the construction of calculative subjects and the responsabilization of clients.
Second, initially we aimed at putting more emphasis on technologies and calculative
practices. This is still important; however, our focus has been shifted more towards the
notion of experimentation. During the second phase of the project, we seek to work on the
theorization of experimentation/experimentality. We are especially interested in the question
of how a mode of experimentation is linked to processes of translation.
COLLABORATION
During discussions of the SPP Summer School “On Crisis” 2013, it became clear that there
is a thematic proximity to the project “Translations of the ‚Adaptation to Climate Change‘
Paradigm in Eastern Africa”. Narratives of climate change have several general narrative
threads and serve several purposes such as the legitimization of “Adaptation Programs”. It
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might be worthwhile to pursue a common analysis of climate change related narratives under
the analytical concept of crisfication. Further, close theoretical links exists between our
project and “Translating Global Health Technologies”. This has been discussed extensively
on the Junior Researcher Workshop “Conceptualizing Technology and Translations” 2014.
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West African traders as translators between Chinese
and African urban modernities
Formal information:
1. Project title: “West African traders as translators between Chinese and African urban
modernities”
2. Project location: Hamburg, German Institute of Global and Area Studies
3. Countries of study: China, Ghana, Senegal
4. Project start: January 2013 (L. Marfaing) / June 2013 (K. Giese, A. Thiel, K. Liang)
5. Academic staff: 4
Dr. Karsten Giese,
- Principal investigator, since January 2011 (institutional funding)
- Fieldwork:
Dubai (10-15 January, 30 January - 8 February 2013); Senegal (15-30 January 2013); China
(28 June – 2 August 2013)
- Conferences:
ESF Exploratory Workshop: Immigrant China, Angers, 3-5 October 2012: Invited speaker
(De facto immigrants in China – the African case: State of affairs and future research
agenda)
AAA Annual Meeting, San Francisco 14-18 November 2012: Panel organizer (China in Africa
and Africa in China: Employment relations as border crossing) and presenter (When week
bosses meet vulnerable employees – Chinese trade in West Africa)
Point Sud Conference “South-South-relations and Globalization: Chinese migrants in Africa,
African migrants in China, Dakar, 20-25 January 2013: Conference organizer
8th International Convention of Asia Scholars, Macao, 24-27 June 2013: Panel organizer and
presenter (Social management abroad – how to integrate new Chinese transnational
migrants?)
6th Chinese in Prato & 4th Wenzhounese Diaspora Symposium, Monash University Prato, 2930 October 2013: Presenter (Pioneers, Greater Fools, and Bag Holders – disentangling
Chinese business networks in Africa)
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SPP Gender Workshop Leipzig January 2014: Participant
International Conference on the New Horizons of Diasporic Chinese Studies, National
Technological University of Singapore, 21-22 March 2014: Invited speaker (It’s the family,
stupid! Challenging paradigms of social organization among new Chinese overseas)
Workshop on African entrepreneurship, migration and law in China, Global South Studies
Center Cologne, 9 April 2014: Invited speaker (African entrepreneurs in China as translators
of urban modernities)
Grassi-Gespräche: China in Afrika – Chancen, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven, Grassi
Museum für Völkerkunde Leipzig, 22 May 2014: Invited speaker
Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften-Sinologie, Universität Wien, 28 May 2014: Invited
speaker (Role and impact of Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa)
3rd Conference on Chinese in Africa/Africans in China, Jinan University, Guangzhou, 12-14
December 2014: Panel organizer (Place, Space and Translocality in the Context of CA/AC)
Dr. Laurence Marfaing,
- Principal investigator, since January 2011
- Fieldwork:
China (10 June - 18 July 2013); Senegal (25 January - 16 February 2013, 25 January - 7
March 2014)
- Conferences:
Point Sud Conference “South-South-relations and Globalization: Chinese migrants in Africa,
African migrants in China, Dakar, 20-25 January 2013: Conference organizer
VAD Conference, Bayreuth, June 2014: Panel organizer (Asian traders in Africa: impacts
and future perspectives) and presenter (Présence Chinoise et mobilité sous régionale – le
cas de l’hinterland sénégalais)
AEGIS Thematic Conference, Frankfurt am Main, Mai 2014: Presenter (Vertical and
horizontal expansion of trade strategies of African businessmen)
3e Rencontres des Études africaines en France, Bordeaux, July 2014: Panel organizer
(Réseaux, adaptation des normes et des manières de faire) and presenter (création
d’entreprises internationales en réseaux des hommes et femmes d’affaires africains)
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Kelly Si Miao Liang (Double MSc in International Affairs, London School of Economics and
Peking University)
- Junior Researcher, (33 % DFG funded + 32% institutional funding), since 15 June 2014
- Fieldwork:
China (28 June to 2 August 2013)
- Conferences:
SPP Gender Workshop Leipzig January 2014: Presenter (Gender Dimensions in Translating
Urban Modernities)
SPP Workshop on Modernisation, Bayreuth, March 2014: Presenter (Perceiving through
technologies of moderinities: Chinese-African everyday encounters in urban China)
SPP Workshop on Narratives, Cologne, April 2014: Participant.
Alena Thiel (MPhil in African Studies, Leiden University),
- Junior Researcher, since 1 January 2011, (one child, parental leave from 31 October 2012
to 31 May 2013)
- Fieldwork:
China (10 June - 18 July 2013); Ghana (15 January - 7 May 2014)
- Conferences:
IUAES World Congress, Manchester, August 2013: Panel organizer (How international
organisations associate communities with the liberal concept of right; with Marek Szilvasi)
and presenter (The re-gendering of public space in Accra, Ghana; with Michael Stasik)
SPP Summer School, Halle, September 2013: Participant
VAD Conference, Bayreuth, June 2014: Panel organizer (Asian traders in Africa: impacts and
future perspectives) and presenter (From street vendor to transnational entrepreneur: urban
Ghanaian youth’s new “Chinese dream”)
AEGIS Thematic Conference, Frankfurt am Main, Mai 2014: Presenter (Coming full circle:
Ghanaian trade agents in China preparing for a future back home)
3e Rencontres des Études africaines en France, Bordeaux, July 2014: Presenter (Ghanaian
trade agents in China)
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ASA Conference, Edinburgh, June 2014: Presenter (Transnational Ghanaian entrepreneurs
as vectors of “world time”)
5.1 Student assistants
Elena Litzmann (1 January 2013-ongoing), Stefanie Schaller (1 October 2013, ongoing)
6. Formal problems with the project implementation
- delayed start of the second project phase (except Laurence Marfaing) due to parental leave
(Alena Thiel) and late recruitment of second junior researcher (Kelly Liang)
Contents:
1. Research objectives

In which ways (mediated or not) do African traders experience the urban Chinese
version of multiple modernities through their economic sojourns to the Chinese supply
centers of global capitalism?

Which are the “things Chinese” (i.e. material objects and immaterial concepts) African
traders select, interpret, translate and re-define within the context of their home
societies?

In which way does the discursive process of translation and creative appropriation
impact negotiating social change and re-ordering (institutions, practices, social
formations, policies) in urban West Africa in an era of accelerated and increasingly
accessible economic globalization?
2. Analytical concepts and methods
- Concepts:
Multiple modernities, actor centered translation regime, social and spatial mobility,
interregional/international mobilities, transnationalism, sojourning, and discourses/narratives
- Methods:
Ethnographic fieldwork including qualitative (open and semi-structured) interviewing and
participant observation, archival research, spatial analysis
3. Empirical work:
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-
Senegal (Marfaing, January/February 2013): establishment of contacts with traders
travelling to China and their partners in Yiwu, Guangzhou and Hong Kong,
organization of meetings in China (preparation of fieldwork in China)
-
Dubai (Giese, January/February 2013): structural analysis of the Chinese trading
clusters associated with African business for the purpose of comparison
-
China (June-July 2013, Giese, Marfaing, Liang, Thiel): African traders‘ perceptions of
China; Chinese perceptions of Africans; the impact of the traders’ contact persons
(Chinese and African) on their perceptions of China; identification of potential
translation objects
Senegal (January-March 2014, Marfaing) and Ghana (January-May 2014, Thiel):
empirical study of re-signification and dissemination of translated “things Chinese”;
preliminary assessment of potential impacts on social change
4. Preliminary results and conclusions:
Our research in China and Africa suggests that for African traders urban China and their
personal experiences thereof are important sources of inspiration. Not unexpectedly
immaterial concepts (such as work ethics, rationalization and organization of social and
spatial relations etc.) rather than material objects are selected for translation and adaptation
into the African home societies.
Although quite a few of our Chinese informants (depending on education and social status)
regard themselves as cultural ambassadors vis-à-vis Africans in China, they are rarely
knowledgeable about which particular material objects and/or immaterial concepts
representing Chinese urban modernities their African contact persons select to be translated
into the social contexts of African home countries. Chinese informants have also proven to
be unaware of their particular roles within the translation process.
The great majority of Chinese informants interacting with African business people in the
realm of trade rarely distinguishes between different African nationalities and usually does
not engage in more intimate personal relationships with Africans beyond functional
encounters. Chinese informants’ narratives of their daily encounters with Africans (touching
mainly on Africans’ “Sinification” during their stay in China, business ethics, imaginative
geographies, China-Africa relations, sexuality and intimacy) were found heavily influenced by
the products and technologies the Chinese government deployed to stimulate modernization,
including demographic control and neoliberal marketization.
Exposure to and experiences of China among the large number of African traders who either
visit China for the first time or only occasionally heavily depend on the filtered discourses and
narratives presented to them by African middlemen in their urban Chinese destinations.
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Hence the role of these middlemen within the translation process (initially hypothesized to
form one of several intervening variables) has to be reconsidered, given that it is in their
business interest to limit their clients’ and fellow countrymen’s and -women’s spatial
maneuverings in China as much as possible. With regard to translation between China and
Africa travelling traders are therefore not the only and perhaps even not the most relevant
sub-group among our research subjects, since their Chinese experiences not necessarily
enhances their social capital and status at home. At the same time, a number of more
experienced Africans claim that they have established direct access to Chinese factory
representatives who not only share detailed data about products sold to their respective
national markets but also engage in regular private exchanges.
Although these findings confirm the general validity of our analytical model of the translation
process, they also reveal a higher degree of complexity than the results of our previous
research in Senegal and Ghana had suggested: a wider variety of African actors engaging in
procurement activities in China (including occasional traders, employees of bigger
corporations, tender based buying agents etc.) will have to be included into the sample
because they engage with different audiences; and beyond the more structural factors that
we regarded as relevant for framing the individual experience of urban China more weight
has to be given to additional and mostly personal endowments and attributes such as
financial capacities, type of business, international travel experiences, level of
professionalism and – last but not least – gender. Moreover, in addition to factoring in the
limiting influences of African middlemen in China other international experiences of our
respondents beyond China have to be controlled for with regard to separating the translation
of “things Chinese” from various other international translation products.
Beyond translating Chinese urban modernities into African contexts Africans and various
Chinese groups were also found to have been engaging in the joint but mutually unaware
production of place in urban areas with high concentrations of African populations in China.
Through pursuing their own economic interests, both Africans and Chinese are forming and
reforming the social fabric and translocal links which give space specific meanings, functions
and positionality – thus potentially making the translation between Chinese and African urban
modernities a localized multidirectional process.
Moreover, the latest wave of fieldwork in Dakar and Accra suggests that since the end of the
first project phase in 2012, the modes of interaction between Chinese traders and their local
counterparts have advanced into new directions – and in the course of these developments
potentially also the mutual significations of the Other. While we initially could not establish
empirical evidence for any interaction between Chinese traders and Africans beyond simple
functional relationships in the two West African capitals in our sample, we have since been
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able to identify indicators of new forms of interaction/cooperation between members of the
two groups, particularly involving our current main research subjects, African entrepreneurs
travelling to China.
Latest Publications:
Karsten Giese, 2013, Same-Same But Different: Chinese Traders' Perspectives on African
Labor, The China Journal, 69, 134-153
Laurence Marfaing/Alena Thiel, 2014, “Agents of Translation”: West African Entrepreneurs in
China as Vectors of Social Change, Working Paper of the SPP 1448
Laurence Marfaing/Alena Thiel, 2014, Demystifying Chinese Business Strength in Urban
Senegal and Ghana: Structural Change and the Performativity of Rumors, Canadian Journal
of Africa Studies, Volume 47, 3
Laurence Marfaing/Alena Thiel, 2013, « Petits commerçants chinois en Afrique et saturation
des marchés ouest-africains : déconstruction d’une rumeur (Dakar-Accra) », Sociétés
Migration, 149: 137-158.
Laurence Marfaing/Alena Thiel, 2013, New Actors, New Orders: The Changing Norms of
Market Entry In Senegal’s And Ghana’s Urban Chinese Markets, AFRICA 83(4): 646-669
Laurence Marfaing, 2014, « Importations de marchandises chinoises et mobilité sous
régionale en Afrique de l’ouest », Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines
Karsten Giese/Laurence Marfaing (eds.), 2014 (forthcoming), Encounters between African
and Chinese Entrepreneurs – New Sources of Social Transformations? La rencontre des
petits entrepreneurs africains et chinois transnationaux est-elle porteuse de changements
sociaux ? (working title), Karthala (including contributions by all project team members)
Connections within the SPP:
Albeit being the only project under the SPP1448 framework using modernity as one of the
underlying theoretical frameworks, other projects mobilize this concept for their analytical
purposes. Project “Translating Adaptation” touches upon phenomena which are explicitly
self-expressed as modern, such as the discourse of being a ‘modern farmer’ in Rwanda.
“Translating urban infrastructures” in turn analyses the travelling idea of idealized “modern”
infrastructure models. Associated projects “Refugee Repatriation” and “Political Cultures in
KwaZulu Natal” approach political institutions through the lens of modernity. In contrast to
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these latter two, we deliberately chose an approach different from common binary notions of
tradition versus modernity.
Our research further intersects with SPP projects on the issue of the transmission of norms
through the impact of global connections and mobilities. “Marketization of weather in Africa”
relates to our research interest in that it traces the effects of market models on relationships
on the ground. Our own analyses of the marketization of employment relationships parallel
this discussion. “Oil and social change“ looks at transformations triggered by the emergence
of non-local actors, capitals and ideas, namely Chinese oil-for-infrastructure packages and
the personnel associated with them. Both projects share strong research interests on
narratives of the Other at various scales and aspects, as well as the performativity of these
narratives
Regionally, ours is the only project studying Senegal. On the other hand, we share the field
site of Ghana with a number of SPP projects: “Changing stateness in Africa” looked at
Ghana in project phase 1, “Marketization of weather in Africa”, “Translating urban
infrastructures” and “Roadside and Travel Communities” have ongoing projects in Ghana.
Their targeted groups of informants do in many ways intersect with our multi-angled
approach, combining the perspectives of traders, market participants, and state officials.
Our project has many things in common with others in the program in terms of gender
relations, including the gender-specific practices, gendering of space and interplay of gender
and other markers of identity. For instance, both project “Translating Adaptation” and ours
explore how gender and modernity are intertwined. Also, empirical evidences from both
project “African State Boundaries” and our project indicate that gender-specific norms and
practices are not necessarily socially unprogressive and could be utilized creatively to
achieve specific ends.
Cooperation:
- Alena Thiel und Michael Stasik (Roadside and Travel Communities) jointly authored a
conference paper at the IUAES World Congress 2013 in Manchester (“The re-gendering of
public space in Accra, Ghana”), which has been developed into the Working Paper “Market
men and Station women: changing significations of gendered space in Accra”. The work
touches upon aspects of gender, changing practices of entry into different public spaces and
ultimately, their impact on changing spatial significations. This focus on the re-signification of
space has received further attention in our analyses of the impact of Chinese commodity
markets on mobility patterns of Ghanaian and Senegalese traders in Asia and West Africa.
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- Karsten Giese has offered regional expertise to projects in which Chinese actors play a
significant role. This has been mainly the case for the project “Oil and Social Change”
- We regularly engaged in discussions with the team of project “Translating Adaptation”
during meetings of the SPP 1448 and other academic venues in Germany, not least in order
to advance the two different conceptions of translation regimes that have been central
elements of the two projects. Whereas our colleagues study the translation of the
internationally acknowledged paradigm of climate change, our research does not focuses on
institutionalized discourses but on travelling ideas of urban modernities and things Chinese
various social actors have chosen to adopt, as well as effects on their destination. Despite
these differences, in our joint goal to understand the impact of transnational flows of ideas on
local social change we share an interest in understanding such processes of translation and
the adaptation of narratives therein.
Proposal for phase 3:
The wealth of preliminary findings during the second project phase, relevant to the main
research questions of both project phases, makes continuation of research extremely
desirable. We’d like to widen and deepen the project’s findings on processual nature of the
interactions between Chinese and African partners in the contexts of globalization from
below.
1. Preliminary empirical findings in China and subsequently in Ghana and Senegal
suggest modifications of the translation model which has been central to the
understanding of the translation process. These adaptations have to be
evaluated through additional empirical research.
2.
The role of African middlemen in China has to be further observed and analyzed,
especially in regards to their influence and control over traveling traders’ capacities of
translation. How the local partners of these middlemen recruit customers in the home
countries has to be studied. Investigating these aspects will further consolidate our
knowledge and interpretations on the middlemen’s functions in the translation
process.
3. The empirical basis needs to be enlarged and deepened by incorporating various
new actors and aspects of gendered experiences for more informed, integrated and
situated analysis.
4. New observations from fieldwork early 2014 in Ghana/Senegal also suggest further
developments in the modes of interaction between different groups of African and
15
Chinese actors in Africa that we had studied in phase 1. Hence, these initial
observations deserve a close follow-up on-field examinationin order to add a temporal
dimension to the results from in phase 1.
16
Constraint and Creativity on African State
Boundaries
Project based at Freiburg University and working in Namibia/ Angola, South Africa/
Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire/ Burkina Faso/ Mali
Project start: June 1, 2013
Researchers:
Prof. Dr. Gregor Dobler, Project Leader
Field stays: March-April 2013 (before project’s start, university funded)
Conferences and workshops:

SPP thematic workshop Berlin, April 26-28, 2013

Workshop “Gender dimensions in the SPP”, Leipzig, January 24-25, 2014

ECAS Lisbon, June 27-29, 2013

„Re-figuring the South African Empire“, Basel, September 9-11 2013

ABORNE Workshop „Bewildering Borders – Transnational Conservation and
Resource Governance in Africa“, Vienna, September 27-29, 2013

Biannual Conference of the German Anthropological Association, Mayence,
October 2-5 2013
Dr. des. Katharina Heitz Tokpa, PostDoc Researcher (employed since December 5, 2013)
Field stay: December 2013-April 2014
Conferences and workshops:

SPP thematic workshop Berlin, April 26-28, 2013

ECAS Lisbon, June 27-29, 2013

Summer School on Crisis, Halle, 26-28 September 2013
Katharina Heitz had planned to take up work in the project in July, but her PhD project
took longer to finish than expected. Since she was the ideal candidate for the post
and her previous work had prepared her well enough for her to start fieldwork
simultaneously with the PhD researcher, the project leader thought that a slightly later
start could be tolerated.
Olivia Klimm M.A., PhD Researcher (employed since June 15, 2013)
Field stay: November 2013-March 2014
17
Conferences and workshops:

„Re-figuring the South African Empire“, Basel, September 9-11 2013

ABORNE Workshop „Bewildering Borders – Transnational Conservation and
Resource Governance in Africa“, Vienna, September 27-29 2013

Biannual Conference of the German Anthropological Association, Mayence,
October 2-5 2013
First results
The project compares three African border regions and asks how the state border, a powerful
institution, affects social agency. Under what conditions and for which groups, does it create
a resource of agency, and where does it curtail possibilities of action? By empirically
addressing these questions, the project takes up the theoretical and conceptual issues of
SPP 1448 and simultaneously contributes to better understanding the role of state borders in
Africa today.
Methodologically, the project uses “thick participation” and everyday conversations as its
main methods, relying on interviews as a supplementary source of information. This
necessitates long field stays, but promises a better understanding of the social relevance of
the border in everyday situations and the practical norms surrounding it.
The project has been running for ten months; the postdoc researcher has only worked in the
project for four months. Results are by necessity preliminary. According to the project outline
in the original funding application, work packages one to three should be completed before
the second field phase starts in autumn 2014. In spite of a slightly later start, this still seems
realistic.
Gregor Dobler already conducted fieldwork in Oshikango, Namibia in March and April 2013,
before the project’s official start. He has been familiar with the town and the border region
since 2004 and was able to build on his previous work there. He was mainly occupied with
updating his data on the relevant actors and on state control (Work packages 1-3). Since his
last field stays, the presence of international actors (mainly Chinese) has further increased.
Local cross-border networks have become more prominent for everyday life, but less
important for large-scale business transactions. State interventions at the border seem to
have become more stable and reliable.
Oshikango is still very much a trade town characterised by lucrative cross-border
transactions. Due to new Angolan currency regulations, however (the US Dollar is no longer
freely tradable, while the export of Kwanza is still restricted), trade volumes have declined.
This tightening has affected different actors in very different ways and changed the power
18
balance in the border region. It is an ideal case for studying the projects’ theme and will be
deepened in a further field phase during sabbatical leave from September 2014 to January
2015.
Apart from presentations at international conferences, Dobler has worked on two publications
of immediate relevance on the project: a book-length history of traders in the border region to
be published in June 2014, and a theoretical paper on the concept of a borderland to be
submitted to an international journal in May.
Katharina Heitz Tokpa has done fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire, a country that is still in a fragile
post-conflict phase, from December 2013 to March 2014; she also spent time in Burkina
Faso and Mali. In the rapidly changing post-conflict environment, she mapped border actors
and the technologies employed by the different state services. Of particular interest however
was the local hunter association (dozoya). Heitz Tokpa lived in the household of the chef de
terre of the main border town Ouangolodougou, who also is the chief of the local dozoya.
Accompanying hunters on their daily missions to surrounding villages, she could observe
their border control in practice. Off the main road controlled by state police, roadblocks and
border patrol points have been set up by the dozow to control people, motorbikes and goods.
The hunters collaborate closely with state representatives. By carving out a space in which
they are allowed to operate ‘beside the state’, hunters have managed to give themselves a
new role and signification in a changed social environment. They will form one of the groups
Heitz Tokpa will analyse in detail.
A second group of great relevance for the study are smugglers. A host of transit enterprises
are located around the customs areas, offering their services to clients who want to import
cars and other goods. At night, motorbikes fully loaded with goods take dusty paths to enter
the town. First good contacts with smugglers and state officials supposed to control them
have been established and will be deepened in a next field phase.
Olivia Klimm spent the first months of her employment familiarising herself with the existing
literature. She has first concentrated fieldwork on the border town Musina and will extend it to
the cross-boundary conservation areas on the border triangles to the east and west at a later
stage. Her field phase was first geared towards obtaining a holistic image of the town and a
mapping of its actors. She then chose one particular group as an in-road to an empiric
conceptualisation of Musina’s specific border situation: farm workers from Zimbabwe illegally
employed on white-owned farms around the town. Here, border control (partly informally
outsourced to the farm owners and delegated by them to farm workers), racism, precarious
labour relations and expectations of violence intermesh to create a ‘strong’ border regime in
which state control is not the dominant factor. This particular way of adapting to a border and
to an historic situation creates a blatant imbalance of power which orders the agency of
19
workers, farmers and state officials.
Comparing these different experiences, the choice of field sites has stood the test of
relevance for comparison. The three case studies promise to offer excellent material for a
theoretical discussion of the themes of the Special Priority Programme.
Networking within SPP
From the first meetings in April 2013 onwards, a number of very promising possibilities of
cooperation have emerged within SPP 1448. We found the joint workshops very fruitful for
the overall framing of our own project and are in a mostly informal, but intensive exchange
with other projects. ‘Roadsides and travel communities’ and our project take two different, but
complementary perspectives on the transport of goods and people; we plan a comparative
workshop to bring these perspective into a fruitful exchange. Anna Hüncke, employed by the
project on ‘Transnational crime control’, works on Musina, as well, and is in close thematic
exchange with Olivia Klimm. Due to the importance of Chinese traders in Oshikango, the
links to ‘Translating Urban Modernities’ have been strong, too. In addition to these bilateral
links, Katharina Heitz Tokpa is preparing a junior workshop on creativity together with
Franziska Zanker and Lena Heinze.
In all these cooperations, the SPP’s overall theme has proven to be as fruitful as challenging,
and grappling with it is an excellent way of conceptualising one’s own research questions
and making them relevant for comparison.
We are going to submit a proposal for the third project phase. Since the PhD project cannot
reasonably be expected to be concluded after two years, the necessity to search additional
funding had been clear from the start (and expressed in the original proposal). In addition to
this, the empirical richness and theoretical fruitfulness of the three case studies cannot be
fully explored within two years, which makes an extension very desirable. By offering
systematically contrasting situations going back to the same class of intervention, the studies
still promise rich further results. As already planned, the next phase will extend the analysis
to include its historical roots, identifying bifurcation points and path dependencies, and will
include the other side of the respective boundary in a more systematic manner.
20
Significations of Oil and Social Change in Niger and
Chad
An Anthropological Cooperative Research Project on Technologies, Signification and
Processes of Creative Adaption in Relation to African Oil Production
Participating Institutions:
University of Halle-Wittenberg; University of Göttingen; University of Mainz; LASDEL (Niger);
CRASH (Chad)
Project sites
Niger (Niamey; Zinder; Bakin Birgi (site of oil refinery); Diffa; N’guigmi; N’gourti;
Agadem Oilfield)
Chad (N’Djamena; Doba (original oil region); Bongor (new oil region); Abéché; Adré)
Project Start 2nd Phase
1 March 2013 (Nikolaus Schareika); 1 April 2013 (Andrea Behrends, Thomas Bierschenk); 1
April - 31 October 2013 (Remadji Hoinathy); 15 February 2014 CRASH (Chama-James
Tabi); 1 April 2014 LASDEL (Mahaman Tidjani Alou, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan,
Mahamidou Aboubacar Attahirou)
Project Members
1. Dr. Andrea Behrends (Applicant, 2 children)
Research: Chad, 21 March – 5 April 2013; Chad, 16-24 February 2014
Conferences:

4 March 2013, PP 1448 Workshop on “Comparison in Anthropology“, German
Institute of International and Global Studies (GIGA), Hamburg; presentation of
project results in relation to “comparison”

26-28 April 2013, PP Thematic Workshop in Berlin

23 June 2013, organization of Workshop with Prof. Dr. Andrew Barry on
‘Resources, Infrastructures, and Impacts: Notes on the Relation between
Anthropology and STS’ at the University of Göttingen

26-30 June 2013, ECAS Meeting in Lisbon; organisation of panel on “Crude
Moves: Social Fields of Global Oil”; presentation on “Technologies of Oil and
Social Transformation in Chad” (together with N. Schareika)

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon
21

3-8 September 2013, CRESC Conference in London on “In/vulnerabilites and
Social Change: Precarious Lives and Experimental Knowledge”; presentation on
“In/vulnerability in crisis – translating development and humanitarian aid in the
Darfur-Chad border zone”

14-15 October 2013; Grantees Meeting of the Volkswagen Foundation Program
“Knowledge for Tomorrow” (as German Partner to Remadji Hoinathy’s post-doc
project)

10-15 February 2014, Conference on “Mapping Science and Technology in Africa:
Traveling technologies and global dis\orders” in Johannesburg, South Africa;
presentation on “Does rationality travel? Translating a World Bank model for fair
oil revenue distribution in Chad”
Teaching:

26-28 September 2013, PP 1448 Summer School on “Crisis” in Halle/Saale; one
day teaching (together with Prof. Mirjam de Bruijn, ASC Leiden)

Wintersemester 2013, Seminar „Oil in Africa“ (at the Institut für Ethnologie,
Hamburg University)
2. Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schareika (Applicant, 3 children)
Conferences:

26-28 April 2013, PP Thematic Workshop in Berlin

23 June 2013, organization of Workshop with Prof. Dr. Andrew Barry on
‘Resources, Infrastructures, and Impacts: Notes on the Relation between
Anthropology and STS’ at the University of Göttingen

26-30 June 2013, ECAS Meeting in Lisbon; organisation of panel on “Crude
Moves: Social Fields of Global Oil”; presentation on “Technologies of Oil and
Social Transformation in Chad” (together with A. Behrends)

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon

October 2013, Workshop: “Spaces of Violence in Democracies”, ZiF Bielefeld,
Presentation: ‘Oil, Violence and Democracy in Niger’ (with J. Schritt)
3. Prof. Dr. Thomas Bierschenk (Applicant, 2 children)
Conferences:

4 March 2013, Kick-off lecture on “Comparison in Anthropology“, PP 1448
workshop at the German Institute of International and Global Studies (GIGA),
Hamburg

26-28 April 2013, PP Thematic Workshop in Berlin
22

26-30 June 2013, ECAS Meeting in Lisbon; organisation of panel on “Crude
Moves: Social Fields of Global Oil”; discussant

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon
4. Prof. Dr. Mahaman Tijani Alou
Research: Niger, on-going
Conferences:

15 May 2012, LASDEL Niamey, presentation on ‘La gouvernance du pétrole’

26-30 June 2013, ECAS Meeting in Lisbon; Panel on “Crude Moves: Social Fields
of Global Oil”; presentation on “Transformation de la gouvernance minière au
Niger : l'exemple du pétrole »

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon
5. Prof. Dr. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan
Research: Niger, on-going
Conferences:

26-30 June 2013, ECAS Meeting in Lisbon; organisation of panel on “Crude
Moves: Social Fields of Global Oil”; discussant

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon
6. Jannik Schritt
Research: Niger, 28 February – 26 March 2014 (Niamey, Zinder and Bakin Birgi)
Conferences and Workshops:

April 2013: Institutskolloquium, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology,
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Presentation: ‘Öl, Macht und Politik im Niger’

April 2013: NigerDay, GIGA Institute Hamburg. Presentation: ‘The history of oil
in Niger and its narratives in political processes of realizing rights, aims and
claims’.


26-28 April 2013, PP Thematic Workshop in Berlin
23 June 2013, Workshop with Prof. Dr. Andrew Barry on “Resources,
Infrastructures, and Impacts: Notes on the Relation between Anthropology and
STS” at the University of Göttingen. Presentation and discussion of his research
project.

26-30 June 2013; ECAS Meeting in Lisbon, participation in panel on “Crudes
Moves: Social fields of global oil”. Presentation: ‘Oil exploitation in Niger: From
nuclear to petro democracy?’

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon
23

October 2013, Workshop: “Spaces of Violence in Democracies”, ZiF Bielefeld,
Presentation: ‘Oil, Violence and Democracy in Niger’ (with N. Schareika)

December 2013, Workshop: “Oil, Rents and Politics”, University of Kassel,
Presentation: ‘Resource Curse and Rentier State in Niger?’

January 2014, Workshop: “Gender Dimensions in SPP1448”, Leipzig,
Presentation: ‘Gendered Assets in Oil Politics: Violent Masculinity, Patriarchy and
Female Agency in Niger’

3. April – 5. April 2014, organization of SPP Junior Researcher Workshop
“Narrating Narratives: Exploring Theories of Signification and Methodological
Approaches”, Wermelskirchen (together with S. de Wit, E. Riedke, J. WIllers)
7. Dr. Remadji Hoinathy (one child)
In June 2013 Remadji Hoinathy received the competitive Volkswagen Foundation three year
scholarship for post-doctoral research and thus stopped working for the PP project end of
October of that year. He remains, however, in close contact with the research group and
supervises the newly employed Cameroonian PhD candidate, Chama-James Tabi. He taught
a seminar on oil at the newly inaugurated Institute for Anthropology at N’Djamena University
in 2013 and 2014. Thomas Bierschenk and Andrea Behrends attended his kick-off meeting in
N’Djamena in February 2014. In October 2013 he published his monograph “Pétrole et
changement social : Rente pétrolière, dé-agriculturation et monétisation des interactions
sociales dans le canton Béro au sud du Tchad” with Karthala (Hoinathy 2013).
8. Chama-James Tabi (PhD candidate since 1. February 2014; no children)
Chama-James Tabi was recruited as a new PhD candidate to continue research in Chad. He
will focus his research on political dynamics of oil in Chad. This focus allows establishing
rigorous comparison within the oil project between the research on political dynamics of oil in
Niger that is done by Jannik Schritt and the new research by Tabi Chama James in Chad.
9. Dr. Hadiza Moussa
With deep regret we have to announce that Dr. Moussa died in a tragic traffic accident on 20
July 2013 in Niamey, Niger. Only a few weeks before we had been together at the ECAS
Meeting in Lisbon where she presented on “Enjeux de l'exploitation pétrolière : étude de cas
à N'gourti (Niger)” in the Panel on “Crude Moves: Social Fields of Global Oil”. Hadiza had
been preparing the “Call for Applications” for African PhD candidates during the project’s
second phase until the night before her death.
Research: 7 February - 8 March 2013 (N’gourti and Diffa)
Conferences:
24

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon

26-30 June 2013; ECAS Meeting in Lisbon, participation in panel on “Crudes
Moves: Social fields of global oil”. Presentation: ‘Enjeux de l'exploitation
pétrolière : étude de cas à N'gourti (Niger)”.
10. Mahamidou Aboubakar Attahirou (PhD candidate since 1. April 2014, no children)
Mahamidou Aboubakar Attahirou finished his Master’s Thesis within our oil-project on
« Dynamiques locales et stratégies des acteurs autour de la ’rente pétrolière’ à N’gourti » at
the Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey. He was deeply affected by the death of his
supervisor Dr. Hadiza Moussa that led to a delay in carrying out research in Niger by
LASDEL. In April 2014 he received a PhD research position within the project for the second
project phase. He focuses his new research on « Pétrole et changement social : Rente
pétrolière et monétisation des interactions sociales dans N’gourti à l’est du Niger ». This
focus allows establishing rigorous comparison with Remadji Hoinathy’s completed research
on oil and social change in Chad.
Research: 1 March - 5 April 2012 and 7 February - 8 March 2013 (N’gourti and Diffa)
Conferences:

26 June 2013, Project Meeting with all members in Lisbon

26-30 June 2013; ECAS Meeting in Lisbon, participation in panel on “Crudes
Moves: Social fields of global oil”. Presentation: ‘Dynamiques locales et
stratégies des acteurs autour de la rente pétrolière à N'Gourti (Nord-est du Niger)’
11. Oubandoma Salissou (Master’s Student)
Oubandoma Salissou conducted several weeks fieldwork in Bakin Birgi - the site of the oil
refinery - and recently finished his Master’s thesis within our oil-project on ‘Stratégies des
acteurs autour de la raffinerie de Bakin Birji’ at the Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey. In
the meantime he became vice-president of Niger’s anti-corruption authority HALCIA (la
Haute Autorité de Lutte Contre la Corruption et les infractions assimilées).
12. Saadi Amar (Master’s Student)
Saadi Amar took up an employment in the oil industry as Head of Communications at
SORAZ (Société de raffinage de Zinder) and stopped working for the project.
25
13. Abdoutan Harouna (Master’s Student)
Abdoutan Harouna replaced Saadi Amar. He conducted several weeks of fieldwork in Zinder
and recently finished his Master’s Thesis on “Régionalisation et exploitation pétrolière dans
la ville de Zinder » at the Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey.
Formal problems in carrying out the project
Timeline modifications:
Due to significant changes in our research framework within the last year (2013), some of our
planned activities have had to be postponed or fundamentally changed. These changes
were:
1. In accordance with the DFG Andrea Behrends interrupted her research for a replacement
professorship in Hamburg from 1 October 2013 to 31 March 2014. During this phase she
could not access her funds attributed to the second project phase.
2. Niger has become a high risk country due to recent abductions and violence towards
foreigners. With urgent travel warnings by the Federal Foreign Office including the capital
Niamey, the research projects of Nikolaus Schareika and Jannik Schritt were severely
hampered.
3. After the tragic death of our Nigerien research coordinator, Dr. Hadiza Moussa (as
mentioned above), some of the planned research activities of our Nigerien master students
could not take place as planned. The local team in Niger needed to be reassembled, a
process that included a call for applications and selection of PhD candidates, which has only
recently been finalised.
4. We advertised Dr. Remadji Hoinathy’s position in an Africa-wide Call for Applications (as
we did for Niger) and only in February after a thorough selection process could we hire a well
qualified PhD candidate from Cameroon, Chama-James Tabi. Chama-James Tabi has
started his research, but only in mid February 2014.
Research Activities and Preliminary Results
1. Summary of research problem for the second project phase (04-2013 to 03-2014)
The second project phase continued and extended the perspectives we established during
the first project phase. We developed new theoretical threads pertaining to the specific
materiality of oil that translates into a number of conditions for extraction, transportation, and
marketing. These conditions markedly shape the development of social and political
arrangements in labour, within oil companies, producer countries, importing countries, and
even science. The connection of the categories of materiality, technology and order within
these theoretical perspectives were highly instructive for our project. We therefore redefined
26
the work packages of the first project phase into new work packages to account for these
theoretical developments and our empirical findings of the first project phase namely 1) The
governance of oil in the oil state's metropolis, 2) Chinese oil industry meets African economy,
3) Technologies of looting and securing of oil and oil production facilities, 4) The politics of
naming, blaming and claiming in oil conflict settings, and 5) Images of China – images of
Africa.
The dynamics in these spheres of socio-political practice in the new African oil states are
analytically prepared for comparison between Chad and Niger during the running second
project phase. We recruited two new junior researchers (Chama James Tabi in Chad and
Mahamidou Aboubacar Attahirou in Niger) who make use of Remadji Hoinathy’s and Jannik
Schritt’s results to explore them in the respective other country (oil and social change in
Niger by Mahamidou Aboubacar Attahirou and political dynamics of oil in Chad by Chama
James Tabi).
We successfully intensified the cooperation between and among African studies centres in
Germany, the Netherlands, France and West Africa and thus achieved our objective to build
capacity. As we planned during the first project phase, we now could hire one of our former
African Master’s students (Aboubacar Attahirou) as PhD junior researcher. We also continue
to train Master’s students in both African countries as research assistants and possible new
project members for an anticipated third project phase.
2. Analytical concepts and methods
Concepts
From among the PP’s main sensitizing concepts, the concepts ‘significations’, ‘technologies’
and ‘order and disorder’ continued to be at the centre of the project team’s research. (See
our first intermediate report of 2012).
Methods
The project started with the idea of using ethnographic methods of participant observation,
situational analysis and extended case study in order to develop a process oriented
perspective on technologies of governing and the manifold transformations that are
characteristic of African oil states. In the second phase we intensify efforts to compare oilinduced processes of social and political change between the two countries Niger and Chad.
27
3. Empirical work
The second project phase was collectively launched in an inaugural project meeting on 26
June 2013 in Lisbon. We chose that location, because we also conducted a panel at the 5th
European Conference on African Studies („African dynamics in a multipolar world“) where we
discussed our research results together with a good number of international scholars working
about African oil production. This meeting served to discuss the findings of the first project
phase, the new theoretical developments pertaining to resources (like ‘materiality’) and their
impact for the project team on analytical concepts and methods.
4. Findings and conclusions
Chad
The Chadian sub-project started its second project phase on 1 April 2013. From 21 March –
5 April 2013, Andrea Behrends conducted several interviews with Chadian oil experts in
N’Djamena, Chad. Her main activity however lay in writing up two papers together with
Remadji Hoinathy, one of which will be published in an edited volume in May 2014. The
second article, which is a result of cooperation between Andrea Behrends, Remadji Hoinathy
and Nikolaus Schareika has been handed in for an edited volume in Social Analysis.
Publication, unfortunately, will extend into 2016 in an extremely overdrawn review process.
Remadji Hoinathy conducted research in the southern Chadian oil region in April and May
2014, focusing on “spatiality, security and changes in social organisation” within the oil
region. He finds that with new spatial conditions during oil operations, access to land
becomes an issue related to maintaining livelihoods for the local population on the one hand
and the protection of efficient oil production on the other. Under different legal frames, land
issues are highly contested, where “Everything is made to keep oil operations going and
growing without incidents and intrusion of uncontrolled or unregulated elements in order to
protect the huge investments and ensure the flow of the royalties” (Hoinathy 2013,
unpublished manuscript).
In February 2014, Chama-James Tabi moved to N’Djamena and immediately started
research with the preliminary intention to investigate “The dynamics of oil exploitation and
local competition for power in Chad”. His research is very closely related to Jannik Schritt’s
work on power dynamics and civil society in Niger. In a possible third project phase we
intend to combine both Jannik Schritt’s and Chama-James Tabi’s research as well as
Remadji Hoinathy’s research on competition over land in relation to security issues with the
projected research of Mahamidou Aboubacar Attahirou in Niger.
28
Niger
The Nigerien sub-project started its second project phase on 1 March 2013. Due to security
problems (see timeline modifications point 2) Nikolaus Schareika cancelled his planned
fieldtrip and Jannik Schritt went back to Niger only from 28 February – 26 March 2014
(Niamey, Zinder and Bakin Birgi). He then continued his extended case study on political
dynamics of oil in Niger and additionally focused his research on the Nigerien oil
infrastructure and the conflicts that evolved around the “Nigerisation of oil”. His main activity
however lay in analysing his empirical data and in writing up papers some of them yet to be
published (Schritt 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d, 2014, forthcoming; Schritt and Schareika
2014).
Prof. Mahaman Tidjani Alou continued research in the oil state’s metropolis Niamey on the
governance of oil. He shows that the governance of oil is an incremental process in which
economic, legal and social logics become entangled (Tidjani Alou 2013, manuscript).
Dr. Hadiza Moussa conducted fieldwork in N’gourti, the oil region in Niger’s Far East. She
showed that in the perception of Niger’s population the oil always flows for ‘others’ while
one’s own people don’t get to profit from it (le pétrole coule toujours pour les autres) (Moussa
2013, manuscript).
Three Nigerien Master’s students who were trained within the project have finished their
Master’s theses. Abdoutan Harouna conducted several weeks of fieldwork in the city of
Zinder and wrote about “Régionalisation et exploitation pétrolière dans la ville de Zinder »
(Harouna 2014). Oubandoma Salissou spent several weeks in Bakin Birgi - the site of Niger’s
oil refinery - and recently finished his Master’s thesis on ‘Stratégies des acteurs autour de la
raffinerie de Bakin Birji’ (Salissou 2014). Mahamidou Aboubakar Attahirou finished his
Master’s Thesis on “Dynamiques locales et stratégies des acteurs autour de la ’rente
pétrolière’ à N’gourti” (Aboubacar Attahirou 2013) and has by now been recruited as a new
junior researcher within the project. The new contract of cooperation between LASDEL and
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen was finalised on 1. April 2014. It includes at least five
months of fieldwork by Mahamidou Aboubacar Attahirou in the Eastern oil region of Diffa at
the latest until December 2014.
Networking
1. The project’s junior researcher Jannik Schritt organized a workshop on “Narrating
Narratives: Exploring Theories of Signification and Methodological Approaches” together with
junior researchers from several PP sub-projects (Sara de Wit, Julia Willers and Eva Riedke)
from 3. – 5. April 2014 in Wermelskirchen in which the concept of “naming, blaming,
29
claiming” figured prominently. This cooperation has been planned in our application for the
second phase of the PP together with the sub-project on “Climate Change”. The young
scholars invited experts on data analysis (PD. Dr. Christian Meyer, Christian Meier zu Verl
and Ulrich von Wedelstedt) to jointly analyze their empirical results. The workshop was a
great success and enabled the PP’s junior researchers to further strengthen their
understanding of theory and empirical analysis.
2. Research within the project’s work package no. 5 ‘Images of Africa - Images of China’
produced empirical data on ‘circulating narratives’ about ‘China’ both in Chad and Niger that
still needs to be analyzed and then compared not only within the project but also in close
cooperation with the PP’s subproject on “Entrepreneurial Chinese migrants” (Giese &
Marfaing).
3. Andrea Behrends and Thomas Bierschenk participated in the GIGA organised workshop
on “Comparison” in Hamburg, where Thomas Bierschenk gave an input lecture and Andrea
Behrends contributed results from research activities in Chad.
4. Nikolaus Schareika, Jannik Schritt and Andrea Behrends organized a one-day workshop
with Prof. Andrew Barry (then Oxford University and the PP’s guest researcher) on the issue
of “Oil technologies in relation to Science and Technology Studies (STS)”. Nikolaus
Schareika invited Andrew Barry to Göttingen for a lecture and discussion with project
members and members of his research project “Urban Food Plus”.
5. Andrea Behrends taught in the PP’s summer school on “Crisis” together with Prof. Mirjam
de Bruijn (African Studies Center in Leiden) and with Prof. Janet Roitman (New School of
Social Research in New York). Jannik Schritt participated in the Summer School.
6. Remadji Hoinathy invited Andrea Behrends and Thomas Bierschenk to N’Djamena (Chad)
to participate in a workshop launching his Volkswagen Foundation funded project on
“Translating alternative modes of governance in Africa: local and international civil society
initiatives to enforce governance and human rights in Chad”. He conducts this research
within the frame of the Volkswagen Foundation’s “Knowledge for Tomorrow” initiative. Both
Bierschenk and Behrends have presented background papers on oil, governance and
travelling models.
30
7. Andrea Behrends taught a one day workshop on “Travelling Models” for PhD students of
the Cologne and Hamburg based “Climate Change” project – funded by both the Volkswagen
Foundation and the DFG’s Priority Program.
8. Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schareika invited several PP’s junior researchers to present their
findings at his institute’s 2013 summer colloquium. The presenters were: Jannik Schritt (“Oil
and Social Change”), Michael Stasik (“Roadside Communities”) and Sara de Wit (“Climate
Change”).
9. The first workshop of “Postdoctoral Fellowships on Livelihood Management, Reforms and
Processes of Structural Change” was organized by Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schareika at the
Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Georg-August University Göttingen (October
16-19) as part of the program “Knowledge for Tomorrow – Cooperative Research Projects in
Sub-Saharan Africa” funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. This program offers opportunities for
further funding particularly also for the PP’s African partners.
Application for the PP’s third project phase
We are considering to apply for funding for the third project phase, albeit with a reduced
budget, to analyze and summarize empirical data gathered in the project phases I and II and
to prepare publication. A further reason for our application are the structural and staff related
difficulties in phase II (see above).
Selected manuscripts
Aboubacar Attahirou, Mahamidou 2013. Dynamiques locales et stratégies des acteurs autour
de la ’rente pétrolière’ à N’gourti. Abdou Moumouni University Niamey, unpublished
Master’s thesis.
Behrends, Andrea, Sung-Joon Park and Richard Rottenburg (eds.) forthcoming May 2014.
Translating Technologies of Social Ordering. Travelling Models in Conflict
Management. Brill: Leiden.
Behrends, Andrea, Remadji Hoinathy and Nikolaus Schareika under review. The Devil’s
Money: A multi-level approach to the disordering in oil-producing southern Chad. In
Andrea Behrends, Veronica Davidoff and Saulesh Yessenova (eds.) The particular
conjuncture: oil, crisis and theory. Social Analysis
31
Harouna, Abdoutan 2014. Régionalisation et exploitation pétrolière dans la ville de Zinder.
Abdou Moumouni University Niamey, unpublished Master’s thesis.
Hoinathy, Remadji and Andrea Behrends forthcoming May 2014. Does Rationality Travel?
Translating a World Bank Technology for Fair Oil Revenue Distribution in Chad. In
Andrea Behrends, Sung-Joon Park and Richard Rottenburg (eds), Translating
Technologies of Social Ordering. Travelling Models in Conflict Management, 76-93.
Brill: Leiden.
Hoinathy, Remadji. 2013. Pétrole et changement social au Tchad: Rente pétrolière et
monétisation des relations économiques et sociales dans la zone pétrolière de Doba.
Paris: Karthala.
Hoinathy, Remadji 2013. Security apparatus and fragmentation of space in the oil areas in
Chad, unpublished manuscript.
Moussa, Hadiza 2013. Enjeux de l'exploitation pétrolière : étude de cas à N'gourti (Niger),
unpublished manuscript.
Salissou, Oubandoma 2014. Stratégies des acteurs autour de la raffinerie de Bakin Birji’.
Abdou Moumouni University Niamey, unpublished Master’s thesis.
Schareika, Nikolaus under review. Creative Encounters: African Trade in Chinese Oil
Production. A Case Study from Western Chad. In Andrea Behrends, Veronica
Davidoff and Saulesh Yessenova (eds.) The particular conjuncture: oil, crisis and
theory. Social Analysis
Schritt, Jannik 2013a. Transnational Governmentality in Niger after 9/11: Energy security,
Coup d’Etat, Terrorism, Oil, Militarization and War. In: Colaguori, Claudio (ed.):
Security, Life and Death: Governmentality and Biopower in the Post-9/11 Era.
Toronto: De Sitter Publications, pp. 193-244.
Schritt, Jannik 2013b. From Nuclear to Petro-State? Resource Assemblages and the
Transformation of political claims in Niger, unpublished manuscript.
Schritt, Jannik 2013c. Establishing an oil zone in Niger: contesting territoriality, ownership
and resource control, unpublished manuscript.
32
Schritt, Jannik 2013d. The history of oil in Niger and its narratives in political processes
of realizing rights, aims and claims, unpublished manuscript.
Schritt, Jannik and Nikolaus Schareika 2014. Significations of oil in Niger: or revisiting the
resource curse’, unpublished manuscript.
Schritt, Jannik 2014. Gendered Assets in Oil Politics: Violent Masculinity, Patriarchy and
Female Agency in Niger, unpublished manuscript.
Schritt, Jannik Forthcoming. Erdöl als materieller und ideologischer Spieleinsatz in
politischen Machtkämpfen – das Beispiel Niger. In: WeltTrends
Tidjani Alou, Mahaman 2013. Transformation de la gouvernance minière au Niger : l'exemple
du pétrole, unpublished manuscript.
33
Roadside and travel communities. Towards an
understanding of the African long-distance road
Progress Report SPP 1448, BE 2310/6-2
Kurt Beck, Gabriel Klaeger
(A) PROJECT INFORMATION
1. Title
Roadside and travel communities. Towards an understanding of the African long-distance
road (Sudan, Ghana)
2. Address of the Host Institutions
Universität Bayreuth
Lehrstuhl Ethnologie, Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät
95440 Bayreuth
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Institut für Ethnologie
Grüneburgplatz 1
60323 Frankfurt am Main
3. Countries
Sudan & Ghana
4. Project Start
February 1, 2011 first phase; February 1, 2013 second phase
5. Members (seven)
Kurt Beck, project leader, member since 1.2.2011.
Gabriel Klaeger, project leader, member since 1.2.2011.
Michael Stasik, PhD researcher, member since 1.2.2011; on paternal leave 1.9.201331.8.2014 (replacements see below Fleischer, Olympio).
Rami Wadelnour, PhD researcher, member since 1.6.2011.
34
Osman M. Osman, cooperative research partner for Sudan, member since 1.02.2011.
Archival research: Sudan, Khartoum.
Matthias Fleischer, replacement for Stasik, member 1.6.2013-28.2.2014. Planned for field
research in Khartoum, Sudan, on highways administration, construction and planning.
Because of denial of visa archival and bibliographical research, drawing of maps.
Francisco Kofi Olympio, replacement for Stasik, member 1.1.-30.6.2014. Field research
in Ghana, Accra and Nsawam: 5.3.-5.5.2014 on roads and highways administration,
construction and planning.
6. Formal Problems in the Implementation of the Project
Fleischer, supposed to do research on roads and highways administration, planning and
construction, was denied visa by Sudanese authorities. Beck, supposed to do field
research in Sudan September 2013, was denied visa by Sudanese authorities; after
rescheduling of research visit for March/April 2014, was denied visa for a second time.
7. Members’ Participation in Conferences and Workshops Topically Related to the Priority
Programme, from date of last reporting (May 2012)
Project Workshops (organized by all project members):
“The Making of the African Road”. Lisbon, June 29-30, 2013.
“The Makings and Uses of the Motor Road”. Thurnau/Universität Bayreuth, June 7-9,
2012.
Kurt Beck:
2014:
Paper “Technological dramas on the road”, Panel ‘Travelling Africa’ (convenors: Beck
and Wadelnour). VAD, Bayreuth, June 11-14.
2013:
Panel convenor (with Stasik) and thematic introduction: “Anthropology of the road”. DGV,
Mainz, Oct 2-5.
Paper (with Wadelnour) “Living with Danger on the Forty Days Road in Sudan”, Panel
‘The Road to Perdition’. ECAS, Lisbon, June 28.
Paper “‘Roadmaking‘ im Sudan“. Geographisches Kolloquium, Universität Erlangen, May
15.
Paper “Socialities along the Shiriyân ash-shimâl Highway”. Faculty of Social and
Economics Studies, University of Khartoum, April 13.
35
Workshop convenor (with Stasik) and thematic introduction: “Young Road Scholars
Workshop”, Wallenfels/Universität Bayreuth Feb 8-9.
2012:
Paper (with Klaeger and Stasik) “Reinterpretation of North Atlantic models: The case of
roads and roadsides”. SPP 1448, 1. Biannual Conference, Maputo, Oct 4-6.
Panel discussant (convenors: Stasik and Klaeger) “Waiting for Godot & Co: modes and
moods of the uneventful”. EASA, Paris, July 10-13.
Paper “Truck stops on the Forty Days Road”. Project Workshop, Thurnau/Universität
Bayreuth, June 7-9.
Paper “The Forty Days Road – Socialities along an African Long Distance Road”.
Research Seminar, London School of Economics, May 25.
Paper “Forschung auf der Afrikanischen Fernstraße“. Institutskolloquium des
Ethnologischen Instituts München, May 5.
Gabriel Klaeger:
2014:
Paper “’Roadside and travel communities’: Methodische und sozio-technische
Innovationen in einem vergleichenden Forschungsprojekt (Ghana, Sudan)“.
Ringvorlesung ’Innovations’, Institut für Afrikanistik & Institut für Ethnologie,
Universität Leipzig, May 26.
2013:
Panel discussant: “Anthropology of the road” (conveners: Beck and Stasik). DGV, Mainz,
Oct 2-5.
Paper “Moving markets: The trails of bread in a Ghanaian roadside community”. Young
Road Scholars Workshop, Wallenfels/Universität Bayreuth Feb 8-9.
2012:
Paper (with Beck & Stasik) “Reinterpretation of North Atlantic models: The case of roads
and roadsides”. SPP 1448, 1. Biannual Conference, Maputo, Oct 4-6.
Panel convenor (with Stasik; discussant: Beck): “Waiting for Godot & Co: modes and
moods of the uneventful”. EASA, Paris, July 10-13.
Paper: “Bottlenecks and roadside vending on a Ghanaian road under construction”.
Project Workshop, Thurnau/Universität Bayreuth, June 7-9.
Michael Stasik
2014:
36
Paper “Vernacular neoliberalism, or how the invisible fingers of the informal market
regulate public transport in Ghana”. VAD, Bayreuth, June 11-14.
Paper “Productive friction: planners’ visions, dwellers’ practices, and the struggles over
urban spatial production in a central bus station in Accra, Ghana”. VAD, Bayreuth,
June 11-14.
2013:
Paper “Rhythm, resonance and prosthetic kinaesthesia in a long-distance bus station in
Accra”, Panel ‘Anthropology of the road’ (convenors: Beck and Stasik). DGV, Mainz,
Oct 2-5.
Paper (with Alena Thiel) “Re-gendering public space: the hybridization of entrepreneurial
practices in Accra, Ghana”. IUAES, Manchester, Aug 5-10.
Paper “Station struggles: planners’ imaginaries, dwellers’ practices, and the quest for
urban spatial production in a travel hub in Accra, Ghana”. ECAS, Lisbon, June 27-29.
Paper ”’Do you feel Nkawkaw dancing?’ Rhythm, resonance and prosthetic kinaesthesia
in a long-distance bus station in Accra”. Institutskolloquium Ethnologie, GeorgAugust-Universität Göttingen, May 14.
Paper “Comparison along the road”. SPP 1448 Workshop ‘Comparison Re-invented:
Adaptation of Universal Methods to African Studies’, GIGA, Hamburg, March 4.
Paper “‘Do you feel Nkawkaw dancing?’ Rhythm, resonance and prosthetic kinaesthesia
in a long-distance bus station in Accra”. Young Road Scholars Workshop (convenors:
Beck and Stasik), Wallenfels/Universität Bayreuth Feb 8-9, 2013.
Paper “CARdiologies: ethnographic explorations into the rhythms and connections of a
West African travel hub”. BIGSAS Colloquium, Universität Bayreuth, Jan 31-Feb 1.
2012:
Paper “Dis/Ordering the Station: An Ethnography of Order and Disorder at Accra’s
Neoplan Station”. IAS Research Seminar, University of Ghana, Accra, Oct 11.
Paper (with Beck & Klaeger) “Reinterpretation of North Atlantic models: The case of
roads and roadsides”. SPP 1448, 1. Biannual Conference, Maputo, Oct 4-6.
Paper “Who is adapting to what, and what is adapted by whom: two contrasting examples
from a West African travel hub”. SPP 1448 Summer School, Maputo, Oct 1-3.
Panel convenor (with Klaeger; discussant: Beck) and thematic introduction: “Waiting for
Godot & Co: modes and moods of the uneventful”. EASA, Paris, July 10-13.
Paper “Contingent Orders/Orders of Contingency. Notes from a West African Bus
Station”. EASA, Paris, July 10-13.
37
Paper “Being Less Than a Shadow: ‘Balabala-Business’ at a Central Bus Station in
Accra, Ghana”. SSSI, Rotterdam, July 4-6.
Paper “CARdiologies: Metaphoric Explorations into the Rhythms, Connections and Life of
a West African Travel Hub”. Project Workshop, Thurnau/Universität Bayreuth, June 79.
Paper “Dis/ordering the Station: Conflicting Perceptions and Utilizations of a Travel Hub
in Accra, Ghana”. VAD, Köln, May 30-June 2.
Rami Wadelnour
2014:
Paper “Unpacking long distance lorry travel on Sudan’s hinterlands”, Panel ‘Travelling
Africa’ (convenors: Beck and Wadelnour). VAD, Bayreuth, June 11-14.
Paper “Pursuing Order on Sudanese Hinterland Roads: An Ethnography of Travel
Communities”. BIGSAS Colloquium, Universität Bayreuth, Feb 6-7.
2013:
Paper “Traversing uncertain routes: Perceptions and experiences of desert travellers in
Sudan”. DGV, Mainz, Oct 2-5.
Paper “Dis/ordering the roads: The production of Danger on the Forty Days Road”, Panel
‘Exploring the moving body’. IUAES, Manchester, Aug 5-10.
Paper (with Beck) “Living with Danger on the Forty Days Road in Sudan”, Panel ‘The
Road to Perdition’. ECAS, Lisbon, June 27-29.
Paper “Making sense of the Forty Days Road”. Ethnologisches Kolloquium, Universität
Bayreuth, May 14.
Paper “Traversing uncertain routes: Perceptions and experiences of desert travellers in
Sudan”. Young Road Scholars Workshop, Wallenfels/Universität Bayreuth Feb 8-9,
2013.
2012:
Paper “Gender and research on travel communities: contexts and remarks on desert
travelling”. SPP 1448 Summer School, Maputo, Oct 1-3.
Paper “Driving through the unknown? Navigation techniques of lorry drivers on a
Sudanese hinterland road”. SPP 1448 Summer School, Maputo, Oct 1-3.
Paper “Driving through the unknown? Navigation techniques of lorry drivers on a
Sudanese hinterland road.” Project Workshop, Thurnau/Universität Bayreuth, June 79.
Osman M. Osman
38
2013:
Paper “Road Safety in Sudan”. ECAS 2013, Panel ‘The Road to Perdition’. ECAS,
Lisbon, June 27-29.
2012:
Paper “’A Perforated Water Skin-Bag’: Safety on Paved Highways in Sudan”. Project
Workshop, Thurnau/Universität Bayreuth, June 7-9.
Discussant, SPP 1448, 1. Biannual Conference, Maputo, Oct 4-6.
(B) PROGRESS REPORT
1. Research Topics and Questions
In our project we look at the creation of orders of the African road in an attempt to
examine adaptation from North Atlantic models and independent creativity in the
appropriation of road technologies. Focusing on roadside and travel communities in
Ghana and Sudan, we examine quotidian road users’ practices and the social orders
created by their interaction in a state of interpretative flexibility of imported technologies.
As has been shown in the findings of the first phase of our research, the African road is
marked by low regulation capacities on the side of planners and authorities, with
correspondingly high degrees of freedom for everyday users. In the second phase, we
shifted towards cases that are characterized by lower degrees of freedom and higher
regulation capacities, which can be found in the newly constructed architectures of
African roads and roadside institutions. By introducing controlled comparisons into our
inquiry, guided by a process of theoretical sampling, we hence search for scenarios in
which limits of local agency and the conditions for local creativity can be tested.
2. Conceptual and Methodological Approach
In our renewed research design, we follow up closely on our previous windows of inquiry
but shift the focus to highly planned and controlled environments. We thus moved 1. from
the old-established, self-organized ‘lorry park’ to the newly built, top-down regimented
‘transportation terminal’ (Stasik); 2. from the busy urban through-road to the newly
constructed bypass largely isolated from its roadside (Klaeger); 3. from the unpaved
desert track to the newly constructed highway (Wadelnour); 4. from the old-style truck
stops along the desert track to the newly built service stations on paved highways (Beck).
Concepts central to our realigned approach are: appropriation; communities of practice
(on and alongside the road) and epistemic communities (of planners, civil engineers and
39
policy makers) and their respective practices of (re)ordering of the road and its roadsides;
processes of ‘road-making’ at the nexus of (technological) vision and (quotidian) practice;
travelling models (of road-related institutions and of the motor road itself); and dialectics
between new structures/technologies and their interpretative flexibility.
3. Empirical Work
(1) Michael Stasik conducted three months of fieldwork in Accra, Ghana (9-10/12, 4/13),
focusing at a newly constructed ‘transportation terminal’: a top-down administered station
built on Accra’s periphery (Achimota) and planned in order to replace the old lorry parks.
Methods included interviews and participant-observation among workers, passengers
and other station dwellers, interviews with planners, officials and station management as
well as archival research.
(2) Gabriel Klaeger continued ethnographic fieldwork among bread sellers in the
provincial town of Nsawam (9/12, 8/13). He looked at the adaptive, mainly spatial and
mobile practices of roadside vendors in and outside town. He focused particularly on the
vendors’ hesitant appropriation of and new forms of sociality along the new Nsawam
bypass.
(3) Rami Wadelnour conducted five months of fieldwork on the unsurfaced Forty Days
Road linking the regions of Darfur, Kordofan and Central Sudan (9/12-2/13). Before the
more focused researched planned in 7/14 and in order to get familiar with alternatives to
the hinterland roads and travel he also conducted exploratory research on the new
highway from Omdurman via El Obeid to El Fasher, focusing on the altered practices of
driving and travelling within its restricted range for socialities.
(4) Kurt Beck, beside joining Klaeger and Stasik in their research in Ghana for
comparative issues (9/12), conducted one month of fieldwork along the desert highway
between Omdurman and Ed Debba with a focus on the modern service stations (3-4/13).
Additionally, archival work was continued.
(5) Osman M. Osman continued his research on safety on paved highways, the road
construction industry, and the informal roadside sector in Sudan.
(6) Matthias Fleischer, beside drawing maps and rendering other services to the project,
conducted a literature and internet research on the road building industry and
administration and the Sudanese laws applying to the road.
(7) Kofi Olympio did interview-based research on road and highway administration and
planning in Ghana (3-4/14).
4. Preliminary Results & Specification of the Research Questions
40
So far, our shifted windows of inquiry yielded the following preliminary findings:
(1) The change in structure and technology brought about by Accra’s new transport
terminal – designed for the enforcement of a (renewed) legal framework by means of
various technologies of control, regulation and exclusion – appears to restrict the degrees
of freedom of quotidian users and enhance the regulation capacities of planners, policy
makers and their proxies. However, rather than effectively clamping down users’ agency
(and excluding ‘redundant populations’ of the sorts of hawkers, beggars, day labourers),
the new structures trigger new forms of adaptation and creativity. Stasik frames these
processes of re-making by the notion of ‘productive friction’ – hence a reconfiguration of
orders negotiated between (planners’) vision and (users’) practice, between technological
in(ter)ventions and everyday encroachments, and between creative and adaptive
measures deployed by both sides.
(2) The construction and gradual opening of the new Nsawam bypass has brought about
a new dimension to the phenomenon of the ‘moving market’ previously explored in the
busy town centre. The modern bypass and the diverted traffic first urged the numerous
roadside sellers not only to move (virtually migrate) away from the town centre, but also
to shift between the selling sites quickly evolving along the still developing new road.
These appropriative moves were marked by improvisation, anticipation and uncertainty.
Now that the road is finished and vehicular movements are routinized, the sellers’ latitude
for movements and for creatively appropriating roadside space appears highly limited –
restricted to their making do with and occupying the few selling niches afforded by the
built infrastructure (in the material form of bus bays and turning lanes). The now prevalent
roadside order and roadside-to-road relations are thus shaped by infrastructural
determinism, yet also by enabling structures created by sellers through their maximal
utilisation of space.
(3) Paved highways and hinterland routes in western Sudan coexists in parallel sociotechnological regimes that rarely overlap. Unlike the hinterland routes where different
users utilise different stretches of the road, on the paved highway, users share the single
lane road. Different in usage, size, speed, condition etc., this heterogeneity is perceived
as a threat for road safety by planners and road authorities and is therefore constantly
under scrutiny. Patrols, checkpoints, speed convoys and tollgates are utilised to produce
a presumed homogenous traffic. On the other side, road users employ bundles of
practices to insure using the road and to compete over its ownership.
41
(4) Planners and state institutions make an effort to include the new highway into a
particular ‘technological zone’, which is – like in Wadelnour’s case – highly controlled. By
the expansion of the highway regime practices of the older regime of unimproved roads
do not simply become obsolete, moreover, their practitioners become reconstituted as an
anomaly or even pathology, at least as a hazard to road safety and the road generally.
Technological zoning, in this case, the state driven extension und surveillance of NorthAtlantic derived technological standards of the highway regime (as embodied in laws,
artifacts and institutions of surveillance), turns them into the undesirables of the road,
very much like Stasik’s ‘redundant populations’, threatened with ‘abjection’. Struggles
about access, despite the dense infrastructure of surveillance, and the maintenance of a
local order are conceptualized in the notion of ‘technological dramas’ which are enacted
through different practices like the detour, the establishment of a tacit ‘zone of discretion’,
the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’, complicity, corruption, negotiation, street-level
discretion, and outright violence. Inspite of a large apparatus of power and surveillance,
the emerging order of the road is by no means a simple result of planners’ and
authorities’ designs but a tacitly accepted outcome of these technological dramas.
5. Publications
Beck, Kurt (2013): “Roadside comforts. Truck stops on the Forty Days Road in western
Sudan”. In Africa (special issue ‘Ethnographies of the Road’) 83: 426-45.
Beck, Kurt (in preparation): “Technological dramas on the road. The Shiriyân ash-shimâl
highway in the Sudan”. In The Making of the African Road, edited by Beck, Klaeger
and Stasik.
Klaeger, Gabriel (2012): “Rush and relax: The rhythms and speeds of touting perishable
products on a Ghanaian roadside”. In Mobilities 7: 537-554.
Klaeger, Gabriel (2013): editor of the special issue of Africa on ‘Ethnographies of the
Road’.
Klaeger, Gabriel (2013): “Introduction: The perils and possibilities of African roads”. In
Africa (special issue ‘Ethnographies of the Road’) 83: 359-366.
Klaeger, Gabriel (2013): “Dwelling on the road: Routines, rituals and road blocks in
southern Ghana”. In Africa (special issue ‘Ethnographies of the Road’) 83: 446-469.
Klaeger, Gabriel (in preparation): “Stories of the road: Perceptions of power, progress
and perils on the Accra-Kumasi road, Ghana”. In The Making of the African Road,
edited by Beck, Klaeger and Stasik.
42
Stasik, Michael (2012): “In the hustle park: the social organization of disorder in a West
African travel hub”. Working Papers of the DFG Priority Programme 1448 (Nr. 1),
Halle & Leipzig.
Stasik, Michael (with Alena Thiel) (forthcoming): “Market men and station women:
changing significations of gendered space in Accra, Ghana’, Working Papers of the
DFG Priority Programme 1448.
Stasik, Michael (under review): “Orders of contingency: African urban complexity seen
through the workings of a Ghanaian bus station”. In Social Dynamics.
Stasik, Michael (in preparation): “’Do you feel Nkawkaw dancing?’ Rhythm, resonance
and prosthetic kinaesthesia in a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana”. In The
Making of the African Road, edited by Beck, Klaeger and Stasik.
Wadelnour, Rami (in preparation): “Traversing Uncertain Routes: Travelling practices on
The Forty Days Road”. In The Making of the African Road, edited by Beck, Klaeger
and Stasik.
(C) LINKAGES & CO-OPERATIONS
Thematic, Regional, Conceptual and Methodological Linkages and Co-Operations with Other
Projects within the Priority Programme

‘Translating urban modernities’ (Giese, Marfaing): regional (Ghana) and thematic
parallels in regard to the relations between Chinese/local vendors and local transport
operators; conceptual regarding strategies of re-ordering commercial (roadside)
spaces; collaboration: joined publication (SPP Working Paper) by Thiel and Stasik.

’Transnational crime control’ (Kirsch): close linkages to the work of Bürge, particularly
regarding concepts of road regimes and practices of road making; collaboration:
Bürge’s participation in Project Workshop (Lisbon) and contribution to volume ‘The
Making of the African Road’.

‘Translating urban infrastructure’ (Monstadt, Baumgart): regional (Ghana) and
conceptual proximity regarding socio-spatial practices of ordering and the role of
technologies and regimes of control; collaboration: Stasik paper at ‘Translating
infrastructure’ VAD-panel (’Models and ideals in planning African cities’).
(D) THIRD PHASE RENEWAL PROPOSAL
We consider applying for the third phase for three reasons:
43
(1) Because of new empirical questions resulting from second phase research. In
particular, questions pertaining to the very material forms of road and roadside
infrastructures and to the practices and technologies involved in their construction; a
dimension of ‘road-making’, which, thus far, we have rather taken for granted.
(2) Because of structural and personnel difficulties (see visa denials and paternal leave
referred to above).
(3) For evaluating and publishing the findings of the first and second phase.
44
Translating urban infrastructures: adaptation and
creativity in water and sanitation systems in African cities
Interim Report
A. Project Details
1. Project title: Translating urban infrastructures: adaptation and creativity in water and
sanitation systems in African cities
2. Project team leaders: Prof. Dr. Jochen Monstadt, TU Darmstadt and Prof. Dr. Sabine
Baumgart, TU Dortmund
3. Project location: TU Darmstadt, TU Dortmund, Germany
4. Target countries: Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Nairobi in Kenya and Accra in Ghana
5. Project start: 01.04.2013
6. Employees
TU Darmstadt
Name
TU Dortmund
Sophie
Anaïs-Marie
Shahadat
Wolfgang Scholz
Atif
Schramm
de Keijser
Hossain
Title
Dipl.-Ing.
B.sc
Dr. rer. Pol.
Dr.-Ing.
M.A.
Function
Wiss.
Student.
Wiss.
Wiss. Mitarbeiter
Wiss.
Mitarbeiterin
Hilfskraft
Mitarbeiter
Kinder
-
-
-
-
2
Pflegefall
-
-
-
-
-
From - to
01.04.13 –
01.05.13 –
01.04.13 –
01.12.13 –
15.4.201
31.03.15
31.03.14
31.07.14
31.03.15
3
Empirical
Nov. 13 to
Nov. 13 to
Nov. to Dec.
-
-
study
Jan 14 in Dar
Jan 14 in Dar
2013 in Dar
es Salaam
es Salaam
es Salaam
Participatio
Annual
-
Annual
Annual
-
n in SPP
conference in
conference in
conference in
Aslam
Hilfskraft
45
event
Berlin in April
Berlin in April
Berlin in April
2013; SPP
2013; SPP
2013
summer
workshops in
school in
Rieth, in Bonn
2013
and in
Bayreuth
Future field
9/2014 in
study
Nairobi;
-
5/2014 in
Summer 2014 in
Accra
Nairobi
Thematic
World Urban
-
11/2014 in
Accra
Future
Thematic
-
participation
workshop
workshop
Forum UN
Berlin 5/14;
Berlin 5/14;
Habitat Medellin
VAD
VAD
5/14,; EASA
Congress on
Congress on
Tallinn 8/14;
Future Africa
Future Africa
Ergebnis-
Bayreuth
Bayreuth
konferenz Dakar
6/14;
6/14;
RGS London
Ergebnis-
8/14
konferenz
Ergebnis-
Dakar
-
konferenz
Dakar
7. Problems in realisation of the project objectives
The reduction of personnel resources in the project’s financial approval for the TU Darmstadt
team requires changes in project implementation. This concerns the study of Nairobi and
Accra, where the workload and the depth of the research have to be reduced without
compromising the research outcomes. Challenges emerge because the dynamics of
translation and adaptation for urban planning and infrastructure provision follow different
logics.
B. Contents
1. Introduction to the research
The research project focuses on the translation of circulating urban and infrastructure ideals
and models in Dar es Salaam, Accra and Nairobi and the way they shape the respective
water and sanitation regimes and planning practices. The cities display distinct and diverse
46
urban morphologies, while similar formal institutions, legal documents, planning policies and
strategies reflect significations of modern urban and infrastructure planning ideals. The
project aims to identify the way, ideals and models are transferred to plans and policies in the
three cities, to explore and conceptualize the dynamics of translation and appropriation within
these cities and to explain and evaluate current planning interventions.
2. Analytical framework
The exploration of urban infrastructure regimes in the three case study cities is conducted
analysing the processes of translation (appropriation, adaptation, hybridisation, refusal and
rupture) of travelling ideas and artefacts (cp. e.g. Rottenburg 2009). Urban planning literature
with a focus on African cities reveals the dynamic interplay between the transfer of planning
paradigms and models and different forms of self-organisation in the co-production of urban
space (cf. Watson 2009; Silva 2012). However, urban and planning studies have hitherto
mostly neglected the shaping of African cities through ideals and concepts of planning urban
infrastructures and through the existing socio-spatial and socio-technical regimes of
infrastructure provision.
3. Details of the empirical study
At the current stage the empirical study explores the place-specific processes of translation
of models and ideals in urban and infrastructure regimes in Dar es Salaam (work packages 2
and 3). The investigation of strategies, policies and plans comparing sanitation and water
supply as well as the expansion of the water distribution network and the community oriented
infrastructure upgrading project (CIUP) provide the empirical basis for the study of
infrastructure planning (TU Darmstadt). The investigation of urban planning strategies and
plans, the institution-building process and the implementation of a new approach to provide
land for settlements (20,000 plots project) serve as empirical cases for the part of urban
planning (TU Dortmund). In accordance with the working plan the project has conducted its
first joint in-depth empirical investigation between Nov. 2013 and Jan. 2014 starting with a
presentation at a DAAD conference on water and sanitation on Nov. 18, 2013. Information
was gathered by interviewing experts from ministries, municipalities, local and international
development organisations and multinational banks, members of local associations, local
residents, elected government representatives, academics and professionals. The
preliminary findings were discussed with local experts in a workshop on 16 Dec. 2013.
4. Preliminary findings
The analysis of the urban fabric of Dar es Salaam shows several imported urban planning
concepts during colonial times and a clear zoning along races with three plot size standards:
47
strict chessboard grid systems for the African population, garden cities for the Europeans,
block structures for Asian population. After independence, garden cities and chessboard
systems remained the preferred concepts. While the racial segregation was abolished and
replaced by segregation along income groups, the fundamental three-zone-concept remains
part of the planning law till today (appropriation, adaptation). The majority of urban
settlements, however, develop informally and contradict these ideals with mixed uses,
irregular layouts and no separation of land uses (refusal and rupture). At the level of the
settlements, the translated ideal of decentralisation rather leads to an informalisation of
planned settlements (hybridisation) due to the lack of capacity on the local administrative
level. It can also be seen as a creative adaption of translated ideals towards local needs for
more flexible layouts and mixed land uses and reflection of local power relations. Also in the
planning approaches translation and adaption can be observed. The study of the general
planning scheme (GPS) and the 20,000 plots project shows the domination of a top-down
approach, administrative hierarchy, overlapping responsibilities, lack of local participation
and institutional complexities. Government departments and international organisations play
authoritative roles without considering local participation in urban planning. There is also a
constant contestation between the master planning concept and the environmental planning
and management (EPM) approach in their translation into practice (hybridisation, refusal).
While the EPM approach tried to widen participation and to introduce more flexible planning
approaches, it did not fully consider the power relations between authorities, and thus
resulted into its replacement by the GPS containing more elements of the master planning
top-down approach.
The comparative inquiry into strategies, policies and plans in water supply and sanitation
shows that contestations in the translation of the ideal of the “networked city” are evident on
different levels. The discourse, but also policies and investment decisions of international
organisations and state institutions of Tanzania display the pursuit of the “networked city”ideal in water supply. In sewerage and sanitation, “appropriate technologies” are discursively
positioned in opposition to the construction of a city-wide underground sewerage network
and respective organisational, institutional and economic arrangements. The comparison of
sanitation and water supply indicates that these two regimes display very different dynamics
concerning the transfer and appropriation of the ideal of the networked city. While planning
approaches in sanitation are discursively contested and investments are low, massive
investments into a centralised network and respective institution-building shape water supply.
However, the inquiries into the current expansion of the water distribution network as well as
the CIUP suggest that the appropriation of the ideal of the networked city faces contestations
concerning water supply. These are located at the micro-level of everyday practices of
48
individual urban dwellers as well as people working in the utilities and local administrations.
In the absence of formal household connections, the ideal of the networked city is
appropriated in Dar es Salaam by illegal connections to the water network, resulting in a
messy situation for policy makers. The expansion of the distribution network was planned to
bring order to this situation. However, it meets on-going challenges that force inhabitants to
further rely on wells and trucks as means for water supply. Here, contestations of the ideal
become visible while the perspective on the policy level suggests consensus.
C. Network
This project shares theoretical and methodological approaches and regional proximity with a
number of SPP 1448 projects, such as translations of the ´adaptation to climate change´
paradigm, road side and travel communities, changing stateness in Africa, translating urban
modernities, and local arena of power sharing. Together with these projects we contribute to
realising the overall objective of SPP1448 - the understanding of creativity and adaptation in
African and the meaning of technologies in the production of order and disorder. The
implementation of this project in cooperation with Ardhi University of Tanzania and the local
municipalities also offers options for exchanges of knowledge, evaluative feed-back to our
research and consideration in local policy development. Project members participate in the
workshops and conferences organised by SPP1448 and its individual projects. Besides
future presentation at external conferences (EASA 2014; RGS London), this project invited
seven papers for presentation at its panel on ‘The creation of futures: Models and ideals in
planning African cities’ (Panel 24) at the VAD Congress on Future Africa in June 2014.
Moreover, a graduate programme on urban infrastructure in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi for 8
PhD students and a post-doctoral researcher will start in October 2014 at TU Darmstadt.
D. Renewal proposal
The project team pursues the continuation of the project for two more years. The ongoing
project focuses on the dynamic translation and adaptation of circulating urban and
technological ideals from the perspective of the three African cities. This concentration on the
place-specific processes of translation raises questions concerning current dynamics of
circulation and specifically about the role, international organizations and engineering and
planning firms play in these dynamics. Thus, our objective is to study those international
organisations and firms active in urban and infrastructure planning in the three cities and the
way they learn from their respective place-specific experiences, in how far they adapt
paradigms and approaches of their organizations to these experiences and whether they
thus activate changes of internationally circulating infrastructure and planning ideals and
models.
49
References
Rottenburg 2009. Far-fetched Facts. A Parable of Development Aid. Cambridge: MIT press.
Silva, C. N. 2012. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: a new role in the urban transition,
Cities 29: 155-157.
Watson, V. 2009. “Seeing from the South: Refocusing Urban Planning on the Globe's Central
Urban issues”, Urban Studies 46(11): 2259-2257.
50
“Changing stateness in Africa –Cameroon, Ethiopia and
Ghana compared”
Phase II: May 2013 – April 2015
1. Principle Investigators & Academic Institution
Prof Dr Ulf Engel, Institut für Afrikanistik, Universität Leipzig, e-mail: <uengel@unileipzig.de>
Prof Dr Matthias Middell, Global and European Studies Institute, Universität Leipzig,
email:<middell@uni-leipzig.de>
Partner: Prof Dr David Simo, Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université
Yaoundé I (Cameroon), e-mail: <simobiegain20@yahoo.fr>
2. Research Areas
Geographic: Cameroon, Ghana, Ethiopia.
Thematic: concepts of stateness in imagination and practice; state as a travelling concept,
facing processes of globalisation.
3. Researchers
In the first phase (2011-2013), the project group consisted of Prof Dr Ulf Engel, Prof Dr
Matthias Middell, Prof Dr David Simo, Janine Kläge, M.A., and Frank Mattheis (now PhD) as
project-funded members. In the second phase (2013-2015), Julia Oheim, M.A., joined the
project for one year to substitute for Janine Kläge, who was on maternal leave. After the first
phase, Frank Mattheis joined a research project funded by the Saxonian Ministry of Higher
Education and Arts (SMWK) on New Regionalisms in Latin America and Africa, while still
maintaining close contact with the project “Changing stateness in Africa”. Felix Müller, MA
and MSc, succeeded him in the project.
Furthermore Prof Dr Heidrun Zinecker (University of Leipzig), Prof Dr Frank Hadler (GWZO
Leipzig), Dr Steffi Marung (University of Leipzig), Prof Dr Catherine Cocquery- Vidrivitch
(professor emeritus, Université Paris Diderot), Prof Dr Paul Nugent (University of Edinburgh),
Dr Fredrik Söderbaum (University of Gothenburg) and Mulugeta Gebrehiwot (Addis Ababa
University) are aligned with the research activities, without being funded by the project.
4. Research Outline and Questions
Seen from the perspective of core African discourse entrepreneurs we are interested in how
over the past two decades order (and disorder) has been produced through processes of
signification around changing notions of stateness. Methodologically speaking the major
51
challenge here is that we are analysing both those actors which see themselves as staterepresentatives, and thus speak from a position of within “the state”, and at those who live in
the country but speak about the state as something they expect things from. The latter may
criticize dysfunctionalities of the state, but at the same time they identify with what they may
identify as “the nation”. “Being the state” or “being confronted to the state” are two very
different positions. And this configuration becomes even more complex when the comparison
is extended to provinces or the state-to-state level.
The project is taking an actor-centred perspective, which is inspired by the spatial turn and
employs empirical methods based in the debate on transferts culturels and comparison (as in
entangled histories), with an emphasis on discourse and media analysis. The debate
indicates to take stateness itself as a “travelling concept”.
Therefore the field work in Cameroon and Ghana started with a view to reconstruct the
signifying processes which are at the centre of the translation of “travelling concepts” such as
the “state”. During the second project phase this work was extended to Ethiopia. To
encounter this challenge, we use reciprocal comparison and the approach of cultural transfer
(Espagne 1999; Austin 2007).
In the second project period (April 2013 to March 2015), we developed the comparative
design further by extending the empirical basis to another case study, Ethiopia. This offered
the opportunity to bring in a very different post-colonial experience. Firstly, Ethiopia adds to
the internal dimension of the research design a distinctive history of stateness and, secondly,
it adds a new angle to the external dimension of the project. To start with, Ethiopia has no
colonial past (though it was briefly occupied by Italy during World War II). Governance has
been dominated by different forms of authoritarian rule: the Emperor was replaced in 1973 by
a revolutionary military junta which aligned itself with Marxism-Leninism and became a
corner-stone of Soviet influence in Africa (cf. Milkias 2011; Shinn and Ofcansky 2004; Zewde
2001). This regime was overthrown in 1991 after a long struggle by an alliance of liberation
movements which consolidated their power in controlled elections in 1992. Initially
considered to be one of Africa’s “new leaders” (read: enlightened), the late Prime Minister
Meles Zenawi has introduced an authoritarian modernization project in Ethiopia (EPRP 2009
vs. Aalen/Tronvoll 2009; ICG 2009; HRW 2010). Also after Meles’ death in 2012, the EPRDF
regime has been systematically implementing its own vision of a developmental state (see
research results below; see also UNECA 2011; Cox/Negi 2010; Geda 2008). In this
endeavour it is seeking close alignment with the PR China (see below; Thakur 2009) and
also South Korea (see below). At the same time, some parts of the country are
deterritorialized as a result of various on-going violent conflicts in the respective regions
(Clapham 2009; Lyons 2011). In combination, the internal and external specifics of the
52
Ethiopian experience introduce important variations into the research design which allows us
to reconsider and recontextualize the research findings on Ghana and Cameroon. Given the
strong agency of the Ethiopian regime, there are also more pronounced elements and
strategies of creativity on the part of the state in Ethiopia.
The overarching research questions on which Oheim and Müller settled in phase II of the
project are (1) Which responsibilities do state representatives define for the state, and which
international models of stateness are used as inspirational sources as to how to achieve the
defined goals?; (2) And in contrast which state responsibilities do intellectuals define, and on
which state models are their expectations based? In all three case studies, we also analysed
the role of traditional authorities in the respective areas, and how people perceive of them in
relation to the state.
5. Collaborations, conferences and workshops
Common ground among SPP projects has been identified with regard to the following subprojects: “African political cultures: A comparative study in Guinea-Bissau, Libya, South
Africa, and Zambia” (SPP phase I only); “The anthropology of transnational crime control in
Africa: The war on drugs, the fight against human trafficking and the combat against
counterfeit medicines”; and “Entrepreneurial Chinese Migrants“ (or “China in Africa”). In
terms of using space as an analytical category common ground can also be established with
regard to the following projects which take an explicit interest in the relevance of new political
geography for African Studies: “Festivalisation of urban governance“(SPP phase I only), “The
local arena of power sharing”, and “Translations of the ‘Adaptation to climate change’
paradigm in Eastern Africa”. We participated in several activities to define further
comparative strategies which are used across the various disciplines being present in the
SPP.
A dialogue on the tension between “technologies” and “significations” has already been
established with the sub-project “Translating global health technologies”. While our project
“Changing stateness” is primarily interested in “significations” of stateness, the project
“Translating global health technologies” is focusing on “technologies”. The two projects are,
on a heuristic level, in an on-going dialogue about this key issue since the beginning of
phase I. For phase II we would like to intensify this dialogue in order to develop a
methodologically and theoretically sound way to identify the spaces of creativity in the
intertwinement of technologies and significations. Technologies are embedded in webs of
significations, they are inscribed with cultural meanings and, vice versa, they have an impact
on webs of significations. This becomes more obvious when technologies travel to new
contexts. The entanglement of technologies and significations opens space for interpretative
flexibility and creative decomposing and re-combining.
53
In very practical terms, the conduct of the case study on Ghana was greatly assisted through
the cooperation with other projects, namely with Michael Stasik (“Roadside and travel
communities”) and Alena Thiel (“Chinese migrants”).
In January 2014, both the old and new project team attended the workshop “Gender
Dimensions in the SPP 1448” in Leipzig. Oheim and Müller presented on “Gendering
stateness in Africa: Some reflections on the construction of “changing stateness in Africa”
between theorizing and research practice”. Furthermore, Müller attended the conference
“Staat in globaler Perspektive”, which took place at the University of Kassel from 30-31
January 2014. At this conference, Prof Dr Klaus Schlichte from the SPP 1448 sub-project
“Policing Africa – Forums of Interaction and the Life of Files in Uganda” gave a talk on “Der
internationale Staat”; Prof Dr Thomas Bierschenk from the subproject “Oil and Social Change
in Niger and Chad: An Anthropological Cooperative Research Project on Technologies,
Signification and Processes of Creative Adaptation in Relation to African Oil Production”
presented on “Der afrikanische Staat als Baustelle”. This gave us the opportunity to
exchange views with colleagues from the SPP 1448 who also work on the state in Africa, and
to reflect on our own approach in relation to their projects.
On 17 February 2014 Ulf Engel co-hosted the SPP-wide workshop on space (with Prof Dr
Detlef Müller-Mahn, in Bonn) which, amongst other issues, addressed the analytical role of
space in producing order (disorder) in Africa. Here, the research experience of the subproject played a major role in understanding the nexus between power, sovereignty and
place-making.
The various insights gained allowed to prepare the successful application for an independent
panel at the Fourth European Congress on World and Global History (Paris, September
2014) on the subject of “Traditional authorities and the modern statefrom colonialism to the
present. Case studies from Africa” (cf. http://www.unileipzig. de/~eniugh/congress/).
The extension and consolidation of research networks in Cameroon during the second
research phase furthermore led to an interdisciplinary workshop on dimensions of a
“sociology of the Cameroonian state” in Yaoundé, scheduled for June 2014.
6. Empirical work
6.1. Cameroon
Within the second project phase (2013-2015), Julia Oheim entered the project as a
researcher replacing Janine Kläge during her maternal leave (April 2013 to March 2014).
During this period, Oheim undertook various project-related activities in terms of content and
organizational matters. This includes: Editing (transcription and categorization) of twelve
54
Interviews with Cameroonian journalists conducted by Kläge during her second research
stay in Cameroon in September and October 2012 (project phase I).
- Continuation of research activities regarding the Cameroon case study in terms of the
further elaboration and contextualization of already existing research results, as well the
realization of issue-specific fundamental research on traditional authorities (including
comprehensive literature research and a two weeks field research in Cameroon).
Based on preliminary results of the first research period, the question of the relevance of
“traditional” forms of statehood as well as the integration of so-called traditional elites into the
exercise of statehood in today’s Cameroon was considered one central concern for the
subsequent research phase. As empirical findings of the first research phase showed,
traditional authorities constitute a characterizing feature of the perception and narration of the
Cameroonian state within the analyzed group of actors.
Consequently, the role of traditional elites as state functionaries as well as “traditional” and/or
“pre-colonial” forms of power were included to the project’s research scope. In this regard,
Oheim prepared a systematic record of the existing literature corpora on traditional elites in
Cameroon. In a second step, during a two weeks’ research stay in Cameroon (October
2013), she conducted a total of six Interviews with NGO staff members, academics from a
social sciences background, and one traditional leader.
6.2. Ethiopia and Ghana
After the expectations towards the Ghanaian state regarding its behaviour in
mainlyinternational relations, and the state's external representation, had been central to
Mattheis' work in the first phase, Müller shifted the observational focus towards more internal
representations and perceptions of the state. On the one hand, this was done in order to
enlarge our perspective and empirical material on Ghana; on the other hand, we were aiming
at developing the basis for comparison with our work on Cameroon (and now also Ethiopia)
further.
After joining the project in May 2013, Müller first acquainted himself with the work that had
been done on Ghana and Cameroon so far, and made himself familiar with the established
literature on the Ethiopian case. Subsequently, he developed a programme of practical steps
as to how to apply the project's epistemology and comparative approach to further field-work
in Ghana, and initial field work in Ethiopia. Building on the project's central research
questions, guiding questions for semi-structured interviews were devised.
During his first research stay (seven weeks during October to November 2013) in Ethiopia
(Addis Ababa), Müller conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with state officials and
intellectuals. Additional field work followed in February to March 2014 (five weeks) in Ghana
(Accra and Akosombo), where Müller conducted 28 interviews, including one chief and one
55
queen as interview partners. On top of the interviews, newspapers were scrutinized on a
regular basis, newspaper archives were consulted with a view towards the comparative work
we intend to do in phase III (see below), and books written by Ethiopian and Ghanaian
authors not available in Europe were obtained.
7. Preliminary results
As we have seen during the research of project phase I, the perception and narration about
the Cameroonian state within the analyzed group of actors differ along two (language/
cultural) regions of Cameroon. Among the French speaking intellectuals the frame of
reference is a version of the Western welfare state (mostly France and Germany), with
particular reference to the education and health systems as well as infrastructure and
security. Regarding the English speaking intellectuals the frame of reference is a liberal state
model, where market processes are less regulated by the state (with reference to the US).
This difference in the imagination of an appropriate state model has a direct implication for
how interviewees look at the role of administration in Cameroon. Whereas the Francophone
intellectuals imagine a state with bureaucracy and call for more public investment in this
sector, the Anglophone intellectuals see the bureaucracy as an economic blockade which
needs to be rigorously reduced.
In addition, traditional authorities play a vital role regarding dynamics of performing and
perceiving the state in Cameroon. Chiefs act as hybrid and highly adaptive institutions within
the sociopolitical field between “state” and civil society. Although often claimed to be a rather
“homogenous” form of “traditional” (often equated to “pre-colonial”) statehood, chiefdoms turn
out to be socio-political institutions whose political importance, influence and historical
genesis vary considerably on a regional level, and so does the perception of traditional
authorities among different groups of civil actors as well as the authorities’ self-projection. On
that basis, it seems essential to develop various analytical categories of chiefs as political
actors within, beyond and in between fields of stateness that take account of the
heterogeneous empirical realities that traditional authorities perform in. The role of traditional
elites in historical, as well as in recent processes of state-performance thus has to be
assessed in terms of their particular socio-spatial embeddedness in order to render them
analytically applicable.
In the Ethiopian case, we were able to establish that state representatives perceive of their
state as a strong developmental state whose main task is the development of the entire
country by being heavily involved in economic affairs. It seems that the most crucial role
models are South Korea in terms of economic development, and China in terms of party
organization. Ethiopian officials indicated that on their quest for solutions to priorly defined
problems, they conduct frequent exchange with representatives from these countries and try
56
to find ways how to make use of external strategies in an Ethiopian context. This
substantiates our claim that the cultural transfer approach is an adequate tool for analysing
policy making and its border-crossing elements.
Ethiopian officials describe the private sector as untrustworthy, due to its primary focus on
self-enrichment, as opposed to the state's focus on everybody's benefit. They reject what
they describe as Western-style liberal democracy, pointing to the perceived lack of a middle
class in Ethiopia which could “carry” that kind of democracy. Simultaneously, officials claim
that they are in principal inspired by Western democracy, but they emphasize that in the
Ethiopian context, the state's democratic duty is to arbitrate actively between the different
nationalities and peoples that make up the country. In order to avoid a recurrence of the
violence and disorder of the 1980s, Ethiopia’s territory has been creatively reorganized into
newly formed regions with the intention to accommodate various groups' demands for more
self-determination and recognition of their respective national character. Currently, both this
federalist agenda and the developmental state model serve as crucial sources of
legitimization towards the population.
In many regards, the views of Ethiopian intellectuals based in Addis Ababa differ significantly
from those of the officials. Federalism is criticized for either insufficient implementation, for
threatening national unity, or for being an instrument of covert state control. The state and
the government are often used synonymously.
Most of all, government-critical intellectuals complain about a felt lack of political freedoms,
observable in their view in the suppression of the opposition, the omnipotence of the
incumbent EPRDF, and the absence of a free press. A common frame of reference for
criticizing the government are the intellectuals' perceptions of social democratic welfare
states in countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavian countries, which is also
where many of the interviewees have studied. Many of them mentioned their expectation
towards the government to take stronger action against corruption, as did some state
officials. There seems to be general agreement between officials and non-officials that a turn
towards radical free market policies is undesired. Intellectuals' demands for improvement are
primarily aimed at the political, not so much at the economic sphere. Furthermore,
interviewees generally agreed that traditional (local) authorities do not constitute a serious
challenge to the EPRDF regime. They cannot be neglected, but it seems that if necessary,
the government is capable of winning them over with material benefits.
Approaching Ghana with a view to comparison with Ethiopia and Cameroon (see preliminary
conclusions), we found that the government – which in Ghana is not a synonym for the state
– attempts to win over the population with development projects that are visible and can be
directly experienced by the population. The Ethiopian government does that too, but with a
stronger imperative to legitimize its current existence. In Ghana, winning over the population
57
most of all has a future dimension, in the sense of getting people to vote in favour of one’s
party in the next elections. Current legitimacy is rather derived from having won the last
elections. State means different things in Ghana and Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, people do not
clearly distinguish between government and state, which matches an environment where, for
example, a career as a civil servant is not possible without being a member of the ruling
coalition. In Ghana, however, civil servants are supposed to be non-partisan, and even
though newly inaugurated governments tend to reshuffle especially key positions in the
ministries, there is no conflation of state and government that would match the Ethiopian
situation. Thus, state officials constitute a more heterogeneous group in the Ghanaian case,
making it more difficult to make general statements about their opinions. Nevertheless, there
is agreement on some principal issues. Officials are convinced that nowadays, ideology is
rather irrelevant in Ghana. According to civil servants, the selfdesignation of the ruling NDC
as social-democratic, and of the NPP opposition party as liberal-conservative, does not have
much meaning in a situation in which people expect the state to cater for basic needs like
electricity and potable water. In the interviews, party representatives used these ideological
terms in order to contrast the two main parties from each other, but agreed that they have
little meaning in practice. Intellectuals who are not affiliated with the state also share this
view.
When it comes to the cooperation of parties with external actors, however, these attributions
become meaningful again. While the NPP conducts frequent exchange with conservative
parties and foundations from western European countries, the NDC often meets with socialdemocratic partners from the same region. Apart from this cooperation, civil servants
indicated travels to countries like Malaysia where they were supposed to learn lessons for
development planning; furthermore, Ghana’s Ministry for Private Sector Development
currently implements a commodity exchange platform which is directly inspired by the
Ethiopia Commodity Exchange. A clear majority of the intellectuals advocate the view that
the kind of governance associated with Ghana's Fourth Republic has significant strengths
and weaknesses. Political liberties like the freedom of speech are seen as important
achievements that need to be preserved; also, peaceful and orderly changes of government
are important elements of a sense of regional and continental superiority – usually, Nigeria is
mentioned as a contrast. Countries like the United Kingdom, the USA, the Netherlands,
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden constitute the most prominent role models in this context.
Simultaneously, however, the democratic cycle of holding elections every four years is
experienced as a serious obstacle to long-term planning and focussed project
implementation free of party politics, thus creating disorder in Ghana. Many intellectuals, and
also state-representatives of various kinds, argue that Ghana would profit from a stronger
58
orientation towards Asian developmental states, of which China and Malaysia are mentioned
most prominently.
A common complaint is that after a change in government, many projects are discontinued,
while new and almost identical ones are begun, often in geographical proximity to the old
ones. The reason for this is seen in the desire of politicians to ensure support for their party
in elections by pointing to what their party has done for the people. In this context, traditional
authorities come into play in two important ways. On the one hand, there is general
agreement that especially in rural areas, chiefs have a significant influence on people’s
voting behaviour, meaning the identified problem of incoherent project implementation is also
due to the different alliances of politicians and chiefs. For example, a chief may be rewarded
for his support by building a road in his sphere of influence; or he may be punished for
supporting the other party by reducing his financial means. Emphasizing its prohibition in the
constitution, the political involvement of chiefs is usually perceived of as inflicting damage
and disorder on Ghana’s democracy.
On the other hand, most intellectuals, including state and party representatives, agree that
traditional authorities are development agents with a positive impact, as they complement the
state and make up for its partial failure to deliver outside Ghana's urban centres. The main
areas of activity of chiefs and queens are education and tourism. Chieftaincy is usually
described as more accessible than the “modern” state, which makes traditional authorities
especially important for people in the countryside with low levels of education. Most of all in
the realm of justice, traditional courts provide a popular alternative to the state's courts, the
latter of which are associated with more complex regulations and financial obligations (e.g.
for paying lawyers). Thus, depending on the respective angle, chieftaincy in Ghana is seen
as an institution that is engaged in the creation of both order and disorder, while the
emphasis on order clearly prevails.
8.Conclusions
In all three case studies, we found that the welfare state model is an important frame of
reference for assessing the state. A felt gap between the ideal imagination of a welfare state
and the actual performance of the respective states was mentioned throughout. In Ethiopia
and Ghana, intellectuals associate this ideal with both Europe and the US. In Cameroon,
there is a difference between Francophone intellectuals who refer to mainly France and
Germany, and Anglophone intellectuals, who make reference to the US and call for reduced
state involvement in the economy. Francophone Cameroonian intellectuals expect the state
to improve its performance particularly in the realms of public health and education. While
Ethiopian intellectuals also find these areas important, they put more emphasis on a
59
perceived lack of political freedoms. In this regard, liberalism, which is strongly associated
with the West, serves as a crucial source of reference.
In Ghana, intellectuals are also influenced by liberalism and the welfare state model;
however, contrary to the other two case studies, the developmental state model associated
with various Asian countries has become an additional crucial frame of reference. Thus,
while in Ethiopia, the developmental state model is part of the state's rhetoric to legitimize
itself against the intellectuals’ claims for more political freedoms and participation, the
situation in Ghana is somewhat reverse. There is general agreement that the established
political freedoms should be maintained, but at the same time, there is a widespread desire
for stronger leadership that should implement development projects in a more assertive
manner. The negotiation of details in parliament, and the frequent consultation of courts in
legal matters, are seen as paralysing the country’s development.
In all three case studies, the state is perceived of as the arena where the distribution of
material goods is negotiated. In Ethiopia, despite their criticism regarding political
participation and the current development path, intellectuals generally agree that the
government is engaged in a serious development effort. This is different in Ghana, where
intellectuals agree that in fact, there isn’t really a development policy. Instead, it is commonly
assumed that state leaders are more interested in self-enrichment than the development of
the country.
Traditional authorities play a more pronounced role in Cameroon and Ghana, less so in
Ethiopia. In Ghana, they are often described as regulating institutions that complement the
state, with political (electoral) and judicial power, and they are largely seen in a positive light.
In Ethiopia, the government has to address traditional leaders at the local level too, but they
seem less influential there. This may have to do with the fact that attempts to construct a
centralized nation-state began earlier there, and were driven from within. The contrast
between “traditional” and “modern” governance is generally less pronounced in Ethiopia, as it
has not been experienced in terms of “indigenous” and “foreign” governance to the extent of
which this has been the case in Cameroon and Ghana. This is one of the aspects we want to
focus on more in phase III. For the Cameroonian case, foundational research on chieftaincy
did not only show the crucial position that traditional authorities have adopted during different
historical phases of establishing political power and state-building (of which the most
apparent caesuras are pre-colonial, colonial and post-independent settings). It also shed light
on the perceptions of the mostly ambiguous and ambivalent ways that chiefs are currently
involved in the sphere of “the state”. While, for instance, the interviews conducted show that
chiefs are often perceived of as extremely close to “the state” or even as performers of state
power, they are at the same time described as independent and powerful political actors
acting opposed to or beyond the public sphere. Aside from that, although chiefs only since
60
autumn 2013 receive considerable monthly allowances from the Cameroonian government
(Décret n° 2013/332 du 13 septembre 2013), they are likewise experienced by civil actors
apart from any dimension considered “political”, but rather as mere preservers of ‘traditional’
culture and customs.
Also, field work showed that common perceptions of traditional elites to large parts reflect
certain discourses on traditionality, ethnicity, and autochthony appropriated by the state as a
national political project. In this respect, the “pre-colonial” and “traditional” aspects of
chieftaincy are instrumentalized by the state constructing a certain form of “politics of
belonging” in order to secure regional power bases and to undermine a transregionally united
political opposition (Page et al. 2010; Rowlands 2002).
9. Goals in phase III
Our findings give reason to assume that changing stateness in Cameroon, Ethiopia, and
Ghana cannot be understood without the relation of policy choices and expectations to longstanding domestic traditions of governance and political thinking, as well as global
developments. When Jerry Rawlings of Ghana looked for development opportunities in the
early 1980s, financial support could mainly be obtained from institutions like the World Bank
and the IMF, which implied compliance with structural adjustment programmes aimed at
liberalization and privatization. In the long run, Ghana’s cooperation with the Bretton Woods
institutions has had a serious impact on the country's political and economic development.
Yet it is also clear that Ghana's return to constitutional rule in 1992 was influenced by the
country’s strong parliamentary tradition, which in turn goes back to colonial rule and the
struggle against it.
After the Ethiopian EPRDF had overthrown the Soviet Union-allied Derg regime in 1991,
Asian governments increasingly emerged as financially potent, alternative development
partners. However, this by itself could hardly explain the stronger orientation of present-day
Ethiopia towards the developmental state model. Apart from the global environment which to
some extent framed the policy choices of the new Ethiopian government, it is Ethiopia’s longterm legacy of autocratic rule based on which the current regime’s behaviour should be
understood.
In the case of Cameroon it becomes evident both from the literature and the interviews we
have carried out so far that the long rule of the current leader and the relationship with
France and other European countries (among them Germany which has a strong presence
there) are the most important features influencing the perception of “the state”. Statehood is
on the one hand strongly anchored in a French tradition of constitutionalism and on the other
hand adapted to Cameroonian particularities (role of ethnic communities and traditional
elites, the division between an English and a French speaking part of the country).
61
We assume that analysing these path dependencies while simultaneously relating them to
our already established findings can be done most fruitfully by focusing on the political
transitions in our case studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this period, the state
was re-negotiated between various political factions in Ghana, Ethiopia and (rather
unsuccessfully) in Cameroon. At this critical juncture, new parameters were established and
one can observe the beginning of a decades-long process of creative adaptation to a world
order which replaced the Cold-War-context of post-independence-Africa; yet, the available
range of possible choices was strongly determined by already established political
discourses and experiences (Villalón 1998). Thus, we expect that a detailed analysis of this
critical period reveals both the political legacies, and their impact on present-day perceptions
of the state in Cameroon, Ghana, and Ethiopia.
During the last phase of the SPP our three in-depth cases studies will be complemented by
the observation of a Portuguese speaking country in Southern Africa (Mozambique), an
observation that will allow for testing the path dependency hypothesis already established for
the other cases.
10. References
Aalen, Lovise/ Kjetil Tronvoll 2009. The end of democracy? Curtailing political and civil rights
in Ethiopia, in: “Review of African Political Economy”, 36 (120): 193-207.
Austin, Gareth 2007. Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling Conceptual
Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa’s Economic Past, in: “African Studies Review”, 50(3): 128.
Buur, Lars/ Helene Maria Kyed (eds.) 2007, State recognition and democratization in SubSaharan Africa. A new dawn for traditional authorities? New York.
Cheka, Cosmas 2008. Traditional Authority at the Crossroads of Governance in Republican
Cameroon, in: “Africa Development” XXXIII (2): 67-89.
Clapham, Christopher 2009. Post-war Ethiopia: the trajectories of crisis, in: Review of African
Political Economy, 36 (120): 181-192.
Cox, Kevin R. / Rohit Negi 2010. The state and the question of development in sub-Saharan
Africa, in. “Review of African Political Economy”, 37 (123): 71-85.
EPRP (Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party) 2009. The Democratic Alternative. Addis
Ababa.
Espagne, Michel 1999. Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Paris.
Espagne, Michel 2013. Comparison and Transfer. A Question of Metho, in: M. Middell / R.
Lluis (eds.) “Transnational Challenges to National History Writing.” Basingstoke, 36-53.
62
Geda, Alemayehu 2008. The political economy of growth in Ethiopia, in: B.J. Ndulu et al.
(eds.) “The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa 1960-2000. Vol. 2: Country case
studies.” Cambridge, 116-142.
Hettne, Björn 1999. Globalization and the New Regionalism: The Second Great
Transformation, in: B. Hettne / A. Inotai / O. Sunkel (eds.) “Globalism and the New
Regionalism.” London, 1-24.
HRW (Human Rights Watch) 2010. Development without Freedom: How Aid Underwrites
Repression in Ethiopia. New York.
ICG (International Crisis Group) 2009. Ethnic Federalism and its Discontents. Nairobi,
Brussels (= ICG Africa Report; 153).
Lyons, Terrence 2011. Ethiopia: Assessing Risks to Stability. Washington DC (= CSIS Africa
Program Report).
Mback, Charles N. 2000. La chefferie traditionnelle au Cameroun: ambiguïtés juridiques et
dérives politiques, in : “Africa Development” XXV (3-4): 77-118.
Milkias, Paulos 2011. Ethiopia. Santa Barbara CA.
Mouiche, Ibrahim 2011. Chefferies traditionnelles, autochtonie et construction d’une sphère
publique locale au Cameroun, in : “L’anthropologue africain”, 15 (1-2): 61-100.
Page, Ben/ Martin Evans/ Claire Mercer 2010. Revisiting the Politics of Belonging in
Cameroon, in: “Africa”, 80 (3): 345-370.
Rowlands, Michael 2002. Cultural heritage and the role of traditional intellectuals in Mali and
Cameroon, in: C. Shore/ S. Nugent (eds.) “Elite cultures. Anthropological perspectives.”
London, New York NY, 145-157.
Shaw, Timothy M./ J. Andrew Grant /Scarlett Cornelissen (eds.) 2011. The Ashgate
Research Companion to Regionalisms. Farnham.
Shinn, David H./ Thomas P. Ofcansky 2011. Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia. Lanham MD.
Söderbaum, Fredrik/ Timothy M. Shaw (eds.) 2003. Theories of New Regionalism: A
Palgrave Reader. London, New York NY.
Thakur, Monika 2009. Building on Progress? Chinese engagement in Ethiopia.
Johannesburg (= SAIIA Occasional Paper; 38).
UNECA (UN Economic Commission for Africa) 2011. Economic Report on Africa 2011.
Governing Development in Africa – the role of the state in economic transformation. Addis
Ababa.
Villalón, Leonardo A. 1998. The African State at the End of the Twentieth Century:
Parameters of the Critical Juncture. In L. Villalón/ P.A. Huxtable (eds.) “The African State at a
Critical Juncture: Between Disintegration and Reconfiguration.” Boulder CA, London, 3-25.
Zanker, Franzisca/ Katharina Newbery 2013. Comparison Re-invented: Adaptation of
Universal Methods to African Studies, in: “Africa Spectrum”, 48 (2) 107-115.
63
Zewde, Bahru 2001. A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991. 2nd ed., Oxford.
8. Project-related publications
Engel, Ulf 2012a. Failing States, in: M. Juergensmeyer/ H.K. Anheier (eds.) “Encyclopedia of
Global Studies.” Thousand Oaks CA.
Engel, Ulf 2012b. The African Union and mediation in cases of Unconstitutional Changes of
Government, 2008-2011. In U. Engel (ed.) “New Mediation Practices in
African Conflicts.” Leipzig, 55-82.
Engel, Ulf/ João Gomes Porto (eds.) 2013. Towards an African Peace and Security Regime:
Continental Embeddedness, Transnational Linkages, Strategic Relevance.
Farnham.
Engel, Ulf/ Gorm Rye Olsen 2012. Authority, Sovereignty and Africa’s Changing Regimes of
Territorialisation, in: S. Cornelissen, F. Cheru and T. Shaw (eds.) “Africa and International
Relations in the 21st Century: Still Challenging Theory?” Farnham, 51-65.
Engel, Ulf/ Manuel João Ramos (eds.) 2013. African Dynamics in a Multipolar World. Leiden,
Boston.
Engel, Ulf / Paul Nugent (eds.) 2009. Respacing Africa. Leiden, Boston.
Kläge, Janine/ Matthias Middell (2014, i.E.) Neues zum Staat in Kamerun? Vorstellungen
und Perzeptionen von Staatlichkeit (= SPP 1448 Working Paper).
Marung, Steffi/ Matthias Middell (eds.) 2014. Transnational Actors – Actors of
Transnationalization. Leipzig.
Mattheis, Frank 2013. New regionalisms in the South – Mercosur and SADC in a
comparative and interregional perspective. Leipzig (Diss.).
Middell, Matthias/ Wolfgang Küttler (eds.) 2011. Nation und Revolution. Leipzig.
Middell, Matthias 2012. Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization, in: M. Juergensmeyer /
H.K. Anheier (eds.) “Encyclopedia of Global Studies.” Thousand Oaks CA.
Middell, Matthias 2013. Area Studies Under the Global Condition. Debates on Where to Go
with Regional or Area Studies in Germany, in: M. Middell (ed.) “Self-Reflexive Area Studies.”
Leipzig, 7-57.
Middell, Matthias 2014. Is there a Timetable when Concepts Travel? in: D. BachmannMedick (ed.) “The Trans/National Study of Culture. A Translational Perspective.” Berlin,137154.
64
The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control
A.
FORMALIA
1. Projekttitel:
Gesamtprojekt: "The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control"
Teilprojekt 1: "The War on Drugs in Sierra Leone"
Teilprojekt 2: "The Fight against Human Trafficking in South Africa"
2. Projektstandort:
Lehrstuhl für Ethnologie und Kulturanthropologie
Fachbereich für Geschichte und Soziologie
Universität Konstanz
3. Zielländer
Teilprojekt 1: Sierra Leone
Teilprojekt 2: South Africa
4. Projektbeginn
Teilprojekt 1: 1 March 2013 (1st cycle: 1 March 2011)
Teilprojekt 2: 1 March 2013 (1st cycle: 1 August 2011)
5. Mitarbeiter
Gesamtprojektleitung:
Thomas G. Kirsch
Akademischer Grad:
Prof. Dr.
Funktion im Projekt: PI, member of project team
Teilprojekt 1
Projektbearbeiter:
Michael Bürge
Akademischer Grad:
lic.phil./ M.A.
Funktion im Projekt:
junior researcher, PhD candidate, member of project team
Beschäftigt seit:
1 March 2013 in Konstanz; 1 March 2011 in Zürich
Forschungsaufenthalte:
October 2012 – June 2013: Sierra Leone
Konferenzen/Workshops (besides SPP workshop and conference):
(a) "The 'Okadisation' of Sierra Leone: Mobility, Insecurity, and Stigmatisation”,
Workshop: "Makings of the African Road", Lisbon, 30 June 2013.
65
(b) "'The War on Drugs' in Sierra Leone: Securing What?”, ECAS 5, Lisbon, 27 June
2013.
(c) “Crisis, scapegoating and ‘bad heart’ in northern Sierra Leone: discerning the
enemy of personal progress”, Contribution to panel “Crisis as ongoing reality:
perspectives from different anthropological locations”, IUAES/JASCA Conference The
Future with/of Anthropologies, Tokyo, 16 May 2014.
(d) Co-organising panel “Mining technology: practices, knowledge and materials across
and beyond the mines”, EASA 2014, Tallinn, July 2014.
Teilprojekt 2
Projektbearbeiterin:
Anna Hüncke
Akademischer Grad: M.A./MPhil
Funktion im Projekt: junior researcher, PhD candidate, member of project team
Beschäftigt seit:
1 August 2013 (1st cycle: 1 August 2011)
Forschungsaufenthalte:
April – October 2013: South Africa
March – September 2012: South Africa
Konferenzen/Workshops (besides SPP workshop and conference):
(a) “Victim, Migrant or Perpetrator? Maneuvering in the Fight against Human Trafficking
at the South African-Zimbabwean Border". Contribution to the Conference "New
Borderlands or Cosmopolitanism from Below?" Carl von Ossietzky University,
Oldenburg, December 6th -8th 2012.
(b) “Challenging Boundaries: Maneuvering between Victims, Refugees and
Perpetrators at the South African-Zimbabwean Border”. Contribution to the Workshop
"The Multiple Truths of Asylum", University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, June
5th -7th, 2013.
(c) "In Search of Security: Interaction between Migrants, State Actors and Civil Society
in the South African Border Town of Musina". Contribution to Panel "Migrant futures?
Future migrants?" VAD Congress, Bayreuth, June 11th - June 14th (in preparation,
abstract accepted).
(d) "Navigating at the Margins? Migrants, Sexuality and Sex Work in the Border Town
of Musina”. Contribution to the Workshop “Moving Bodies. The Corporeal Dimensions
of Migration in Southern Africa”. Universities of Edinburgh and of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, September 2014 (in preparation, abstract accepted).
6. Formale Probleme bei der Umsetzung des Projektes
Teilprojekt 1 (Michael Bürge; Sierra Leone)
66
Considerable administrative challenges arose from Bürge's transnational transfer from the
University of Zürich to the University of Konstanz which became necessary after the Swiss—
German cooperation in this project had to be institutionally restructured. During fieldwork in
Sierra Leone, one of the challenges was the access to the respective law enforcement and
security agencies; access to the main agency involved in the fight against transnational
organised crime was promised time and again, but in the end never granted. In addition, lack
of official permits for working at the borderlands made research at official border posts only
situationally possible. Further, archival work in the National Archives in Freetown was
started, yet was severely hindered due to lack of personnel in the archive. Finally, a
considerable amount of data was lost due to the theft of notebooks and (encrypted)
electronic devices.
Teilprojekt 2 (Anna Hüncke; South Africa)
One of the main challenges during the first phase of fieldwork was to get a research
permission by the South African police. A major challenge during the second phase of
fieldwork was that no official research access was granted to the border post of Beitbridge,
so that gathering data on the work of police border officials turned out to be very difficult.
Another main challenge during the second fieldwork phase was to establish rapport with
informants, e.g. sex workers, who demanded payment for interviews.
B.
INHALTLICH
Teilprojekt 1 (Michael Bürge; Sierra Leone)
1.
Untersuchungsgegenstand und Fragestellung
The sub-project has practices of signification and translation in the 'war on drugs' in Sierra
Leone as its object of inquiry. It explores how different actors and agencies involved in the
regulation of flows of drugs navigate a constantly transforming social environment that is
characterized by conflicting ideas of crime and concepts of security. Adapting themselves to
and being influenced by this social environment, actors strive to shape the latter in order to
attain personal (social) security. The study zooms in on interactions between different actors
within different law enforcing agencies (as well as between them) and law breaking actors; it
inquires how these actors and agencies translate different priorities in regulating flows of
goods and people in accordance with their own (social) security concerns, in doing so,
negotiating and re-configuring boundaries and linkages of what is considered to be 'legal'
and 'illegal'.
2.
Verwendete analytische Konzepte und methodische Ansätze
67
Participant observation as well as in-depth interviews were used to inquire into everyday
practices of the abovementioned actors. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork enabled to follow
actors in time and space in their situational crossings or shifting of borders between legal and
illegal, licit and illicit. 'Security' is the sub-project's central analytical concept; it is used as a
lens for looking at processes and technologies of ordering and shaping subjectivities and
social practices. 'Security' is thereby theorised as a particular spatio-temporal manifestation
and the mutual co-production of different types of power typologised by Michel Foucault:
sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical (Foucault 2007; Collier 2009; Nail 2013).
3.
Empirische Arbeit
The main site of Bürge's seven months of investigation into practices of controlling drugs,
crime and people has been around Makeni, the capital of Sierra Leone's Northern Province,
which is a nodal point for the production, exportation, selling and consumption – and, thus,
control – of cannabis. Ethnographic methods enabled to inquire into the local intertwining of
flows of cannabis with other (il/legal) flows of (foreign) capital and work force, as well as into
practices of controlling these flows by various actors according to their diverging ideas of
security. In Freetown, ethnographic fieldwork mainly consisted of conversations with staff of
national law enforcement and security agencies; additionally, documents were collected for
analysis.
4.
Ergebnisse und Schlüsse
Makeni in Sierra Leone's Northern Province (instead of the capital Freetown) was chosen as
the main site for fieldwork. This allowed important insights into spatio-temporal differences
and contradictions in how the issue of (drug) crime control is addressed and given meaning
to by various local, national and international actors and agencies against the background of
other regulations concerning the flow of goods, capital, and people. These actors translate
the imperative to drug control into practices which conform to their own ideas of proper
regulation. In lieu of concerted efforts to curb flows of drugs as stipulated in official
documents of agencies involved in the ‘war on drugs’, rather a splintering of activities can
therefore be observed which converge and compete with official policies in often unforeseen
ways. The official 'war on drugs', that is supported by international donors deploying their
knowledge and logistics, takes place primarily in the capital, its seaport and international
airport, where cocaine consignments for Europe are (allegedly) transshipped. By contrast,
controlling the provinces and cannabis is left to national security agencies, as international
agencies consider them as less important for the global 'war on drugs'. Yet, unknown and/or
ignored by national and international agencies, the neglected provinces are not only the sites
for cultivating cannabis for a local and regional market; they are also sites where big
consignments of cocaine arrive, are consumed, but also repacked and sent out of the
country. Cannabis plays a vital role in the country's social fabric and is therefore often part of
68
political and economic power relations as well as its contestations. As a consequence,
politicians and government functionaries often opt for managing this market instead of
eradicating it. The sub-project shows that, whereas punctual repressive operations against
cannabis producers and traffickers secure some success in seizure-records, they do not stop
these flows due to the lack of alternatives for securing people's livelihoods.
5.
Präzisierung der ursprünglichen Fragestellung
How are different priorities in and concepts of security translated in the various encounters of
actors involved in the control of drugs and intertwined goods, and which possibilities are
opening up for these actors to navigate the social environment according to their projects?
Teilprojekt 2 (Anna Hüncke; South Africa)
1.
Untersuchungsgegenstand und Fragestellung
The sub-project explores technologies and systems of signification in the fight against human
trafficking around Musina, a South African border town to Zimbabwe that presently
experiences rapid transformations. It analyses law enforcement officials' and other actors'
ways of transferring the notion of human trafficking to migration related offences or to actions
which appear inexplicable and are perceived to pose a threat to (individual) security. Anti'human trafficking' in South Africa has become part of agendas of transnational crime control
by translating migration practices into an international security concern. In addition, being
mainly related to sexual exploitation, human trafficking has become linked to questions of
sexual morality. As a signatory of the Palermo Protocol, South Africa has committed itself to
passing anti-trafficking legislation. However, only through international pressure the South
African Trafficking in Persons Bill became law in July 2013 after restrictive changes for socalled victims, i.e. restrictive visa and asylum conditions,were affected.
2.
Verwendete analytische Konzepte und methodische Ansätze
The study takes an actor-oriented approach by analysing individuals’ interactions with each
other and considering organizations as dynamic entities being represented by and enacted
through the practices of individuals. The first phase of the fieldwork concentrated on
interviewing to gain an overview on how different stakeholders deal with human trafficking
and migration, and to establish rapport with informants. During the second phase of
fieldwork, participant observation formed the core method in formal settings like workshops
and informal settings like police patrols. This allowed to explore how the aforementioned
actors make sense of human trafficking and migration. In addition, through the analysis of
69
NGO reports, South African media coverage, and international and domestic law, the
collected data were contextualized in the South African setting.
3.
Empirische Arbeit
The first part of fieldwork began in March 2012 (six months), the second in April 2013 (seven
months). This allowed tracking developments during the legislation process. Though most
fieldwork was conducted in and around Musina, other locations in Cape Town, Pretoria and
Johannesburg (as centres of institutional stakeholders) and Zimbabwe (as main resource
country of migration to South Africa) were also visited. Prior to fieldwork, Hüncke conducted
an analysis on the perceptions of human trafficking in South African print media.
4.
Ergebnisse und Schlüsse
The media analysis made clear that newspaper reports on human trafficking often create the
image of 'the criminal migrant' and simultaneously challenge the authority of the South
African police. Police officials are said to treat foreign victims badly but are also depicted as
unable to protect South Africans. Ethnographic fieldwork showed that Musina is a place of
insecurity where trust between actors collapses and is rebuilt continuously to provide at least
a minimum of (individual) security. In their attempts to create a ‘licit’ order, police officials
manoeuvre between legal rules and their own moral values and interests when dealing with,
for example, migrants or sex workers. Their adaptations of legal provisions are influenced by
other actors' (including local people, humanitarian representatives and migrants) perceptions
of the police forces. Taken together, the South African debate around human trafficking has
shown how external institutions influence state actors, and how the issue is appropriated by
stakeholders who claim to be knowledgeable about it. These actors argue to uplift law
enforcement officials through training on anti-human trafficking and to empower so-called
vulnerable groups through awareness-raising. At the same time, narratives about human
trafficking often refer to sexual exploitation; this opens the debate for proponents and
opponents of a decriminalization of sex work. The latter argue that sex work contributes to
human trafficking, whereas proponents claim that a decriminalization helps to uncover cases.
These different approaches attest to the fact that actors adapt existing technologies under
new security imperatives. In addition, since human trafficking is perceived to constitute a
'hidden crime', mysterious stories entwine around it allowing actors to give meaning to
apparently inexplicable and threatening occurrences.
5.
Präzisierung der ursprünglichen Fragestellung
How do different security conceptions become expressed through interactions and
negotiations between law enforcement officials and other actors in the context of human
trafficking and migration at the South African border to Zimbabwe?
70
C.
VERNETZUNG
Generally speaking, there have been and continue to be strong links of both sub-projects to
the SPP-project by Dr. Julia Hornberger on the 'Fight Against Counterfeit Medication'.
Besides this overarching cooperation, each of the sub-projects has established its own
academic contacts and networks, depending on the topic and region of research:
Teilprojekt 1 (Michael Bürge; Sierra Leone)
1. Gegenstandsbezogene, regionale, theoretische und methodische Nähen bzw. Kontraste
zu anderen Teilprojekten
(a) The workshop on the 'Making of African Roads' organised by members of the
'Roadside and Travel Communities' SPP-project (Lisbon, June 2013) stimulated
discussion and reflection on sociocultural and moral dimensions of transportation and
mobility, the interception and facilitation of connections and social networks. This
culminated in the submission of a chapter for an edited volume planned by the project
members.
(b) Occasional exchange with Sarah Biecker (SPP-project: 'Policing Africa') about
practices of everyday policing which is planned to be reflected in a co-authored paper
and/or panel for a conference.
(c) Regular discussions with Julia Hornberger (SPP-project: 'Fight Against Counterfeit
Medication') about the regulation of circulation of drugs and practices to discern the value
of il/legal goods were enabled by the research seminar at the University of Konstanz and
by the gender workshop in Leipzig.
2. Kooperationen
(a) Regular exchange with and scientific advice by Dr. Gerhard Anders (Centre for African
Studies in Edinburgh) who is the co-supervisor of Bürge's PhD dissertation and working in
Sierra Leone on international criminal justice.
(b) Collaboration with Prof. Krijn Peters (University of Swansea), a leading scholar on
Sierra Leone and currently doing research on drug trafficking in Sierra Leone; he also
made contact between Bürge and other doctoral students working on similar topics (e.g.,
Chris Suckling, London School of Economics).
(c) Collaboration with Robert Pijpers (University of Oslo) and Lorenzo d’Angelo (Università
Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan / International Research Center ‘Work and Human
Lifecycle in Global History’, Berlin) around issues of security and il/legality in northern
Sierra Leone; this collaboration will find expression in a panel at the EASA 2014
conference that is co-organised by Lorenzo d’Angelo and Michael Bürge and attended by
Robert Pijpers; the panel will also be attended by Matthieu Bolay (University of Neuchâtel)
71
with whom occasional meetings were organised around issues of trade in illegal goods in
Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Mali.
(d) During fieldwork in Sierra Leone, contact was established with Nina Engwicht (Max
Planck Institute for the Study of Societies) leading to some informal exchanges about
crime and il/legal markets in Sierra Leone.
3. Austausch
Daily exchange with project co-member Anna Hüncke, and Tim Bunke and Sarah Fuchs
(cost-neutral members of the ATCC project group) at the Department of Social and
Cultural Anthropology at the University of Konstanz.
Teilprojekt 2 (Anna Hüncke; South Africa)
1. Gegenstandsbezogene, regionale, theoretische und methodische Nähen bzw. Kontraste
zu anderen Teilprojekten
(a) Regular exchange with Dr. Julia Hornberger (SPP-project: 'Fight Against Counterfeit
Medication') on law enforcement agencies in the context of transnational crime in South
Africa
(b) Regular exchange with Prof. Dr. Gregor Dobler (second PhD thesis supervisor) and
with Olivia Klimm (SPP project: "Creativity and Constraint on African State
Boundaries", University of Freiburg): both projects are focused on border issues and on
the South African Zimbabwean border area.
2. Kooperationen
(a) Planning and conducting of a gender workshop for the SPP PhD candidates in
January 2013; together with M. Fuhrmann, University of Nürnberg-Erlangen (part of
SPP1443 until April 2013) and C. Simons ("Local Arenas of Power Sharing", Stiftung
Wissenschaft und Forschung).
(b) Workshop on policing with Jan Beek and Mirco Göpfert, University of Mainz,
December 2011.
3. Austausch
(a) Daily exchange with project co-member Michael Bürge and with Tim Bunke and
Sarah Fuchs (associated members/ cost-neutral members of the "Anthropology of
Transnational Crime Control" project group)
72
(b) Exchange with Treasa Galvin, University of Botswana, on deportations and asylum
rights in Botswana and South Africa with a focus on Zimbabwean migrants, August
2013.
(c) Exchange with Elsa Olivera and Jo Vearey, African Centre for Migration and
Society, University of Witwatersrand, on South African sex work industry and the
position of (migrant) sex workers in Musina and Johannesburg, September, October
2013.
Keine Fortsetzung geplant.
73
Translating Global Health Technologies: Standardisation
and organisational learning in health care provision in
Uganda and Rwanda
A.
FORMALIA
1. Projekttitel:
Translating Global Health Technologies: Standardisation and organisational learning in
health care provision in Uganda and Rwanda
2. Projektstandort:
Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Universität Bayreuth
3. Zielländer
Uganda und Ruanda
4. Projektbeginn
01.03.2013
5. Mitarbeiter
Projektleitung:
Richard Rottenburg und Dieter Neubert
Akademischer Grad: Prof. Dr. und Prof. Dr.
Funktion im Projekt: PIs, members of project team
Projektbearbeiter:
Herbert Muyinda
Akademischer Grad:
Dr.
Funktion im Projekt:
Mercator Fellow, member of project team
Beschäftigt seit:
1 March 2013
Forschungsaufenthalte:
August 2013; Oktober – November 2013 Mercatorfellow in
Halle
74
Konferenzen/Workshops (besides SPP workshop and conference):
Projektbearbeiter:
Uli Beisel
Akademischer Grad:
Dr.
Funktion im Projekt:
member of project team
Beschäftigt seit:
1 March 2013, Elternzeit: 15.03.2013 – 01.03.2014
Forschungsaufenthalte:
März 2014
Konferenzen/Workshops (besides SPP workshop and conference):
Umlauf, R. & Beisel, U. (08/2013) “Emerging Geographies of Care: The Role of Rapid
Diagnostic Tests in Access to Malaria Care”, Presentation at WHO lunch time seminar
Beisel, U. (09/2013) In/vulnerable Infrastructures - malaria community volunteers in Sierra
Leone between medical care and development. CRESC Centre for the Study of Social
Change Annual Conference, London, UK
Beisel, U. (01/2014). Mobilities of access to health care: introducing rapid diagnostic tests for
malaria in humanitarian aid. Queen Mary University of London, Department of Geography
Seminar Series, London, UK
Projektbearbeiter:
Norman Schräpel
Akademischer Grad:
M.A.
Funktion im Projekt:
junior researcher, PhD candidate, member of project team
Beschäftigt seit:
1 March 2013 in Halle
Forschungsaufenthalte:
August-September 2013, März 2014
Konferenzen/Workshops (besides SPP workshop and conference):
Commissioned Paper: Traveling Technologies: Global health, medical data and the
translation of the Millennium Development Goals in Rwanda. Conference: 6th International
Conference on the Great Lakes Region. Peace and Security Dynamics in the Great Lakes
Region, Kigali, Rwanda (20-21 March 2014)
Paper: Technologies of Inscription and the translation of the Millennium Development Goals
in Rwanda. Conference: Mapping Science and Technology in Africa: Traveling technologies
and global dis\orders, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (12-15
February 2014)
75
Conference Co-Organized: Mapping Science and Technology in Africa: Traveling
technologies and global dis\orders, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
(12-15 February 2014)
Paper: Organization by contracts Prudential Politics and the Translation of the Millennium
Development Goals in Rwanda. Colloquium: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
Halle, Germany (17 December 2013)
Paper: Irritations of fieldwork: experiences and challenges of conducting research on health
in Rwanda. Summer School: Well-being at the Margins: Seeking Health in Stratified
Landscapes of Medicine and Healing, Berlin, Germany (22-28 July 2013)
Paper: Information and Communication Technologies, Medical Data Production and the
Politics of Global Health in Rwanda. Summer School: Situating Media. Ethnographic
Inquiries into Mediation, Siegen, Germany (15-19 July 2013)
Paper: Translating Medical Data Infrastructures: Technologies of Inscription and the
Organization of (Global) Health in Rwanda. Conference Proceedings. Conference: 12th
International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, Ocho
Rios, Jamaica (19-22 May 2013)
Panel Co-Organized: Caring for a Connected Humanity: eHealth and the Transformation of
Health care in the Global South. Conference: 12th International Conference on Social
Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, Ocho Rios, Jamaica (19-22 May 2013)
Participation: Comparison Re-invented: Adaptation of Universal Methods to African Studies,
GIGA Hamburg, Germany (4 March 2014)
Projektbearbeiter:
Rene Umlauf
Akademischer Grad:
M.A.
Funktion im Projekt:
junior researcher, PhD candidate, member of project team
Beschäftigt seit:
1 March 2013 in Bayreuth
Forschungsaufenthalte:
Mai – Juli 2013, Februar – April 2014
Konferenzen/Workshops (besides SPP workshop and conference):
Umlauf, R. & Beisel, U. (08/2013) “Emerging Geographies of Care: The Role of Rapid
Diagnostic Tests in Access to Malaria Care”, Presentation at WHO lunch time seminar
76
6. Formale Probleme bei der Umsetzung des Projektes
Der von uns im Projektantrag als research assistant genannte Freddy Kitutu musste leider
vor Beginn der Projektphase II entlassen werden, da seine projektbezogenen Leistungen
qualitativ nicht ausreichend waren. Wir haben lange nach einem Ersatz gesucht und in
Uganda und Ruanda über unsere Netzwerke keine passende Person gefunden. Wir konnten
nun Arlena Liggins gewinnen, die auf Werkvertragsbasis ab April 2014 als research assistant
zum Projekt beiträgt.
In
Ruanda
bemühen wir
uns
seit
September
2012
um
den Abschluss
eines
Austauschvertrages zwischen der National University of Rwanda und der MLU. Während wir
weiterhin optimistisch sind, ist dieser Vetrag bis heute nicht unterschrieben. Damit hängt es
auch zusammen, dass die “Ethical Clearance” noch in Arbeit ist, wir hoffen das Dokument im
April/Mai 2014 zu erhalten. Die “Ethical Clearance” in Uganda haben wir im März erhalten.
B.
INHALTLICH
Project abstract:
This project analyses practices of adaptation, creativity and organisational learning by
focusing on traveling health technologies in selected districts in Uganda and Rwanda. In
order to capture the complexities that changing health care practices entail for patients,
health staff and the overall organisation of health care in Uganda and Rwanda, our project
conceptualises translation as a two-way process: this enables us to trace how creative
practices adapt technologies to specific contexts, and in turn, how these contexts are also
adapted to the technologies, e.g. through various forms of organisational learning. Our main
research objective is to analyse how therapeutic agencements change when travelling
technologies are being translated to particular sites. In order to trace these processes, we
document practices of creativity, adaptation and organizational learning in three different
global health technologies and work packages:
Work Package I: Rapid tests and changing diagnostic agencements
The aim of this work package is to identify and compare the specific role selected
technologies of standardisation play in the identification and diagnosis of diseases. The core
research question focuses on how diagnostic technologies translate individual (bodily)
symptoms into disease categories, and thus render diagnosis compatible with available
treatment options.
77
Work package II: Access to treatment and organisational learning
In this work package we map and analyse the institutional shifts that new technologies of
access engender. The core question tracks how standardisation of health services and
treatment protocols has been triggered by as well as led to organisational learning.
Work package III: Institutionalisation of medical data management
This work package concentrates on how (new) digital and analogue data infrastructures are
institutionalised
in
therapeutic
agencements.
The
core
questions
analyses
how
documentation and monitoring of medical and pharmaceutical practices co-constitute and reorder organisational learning processes, and how far these changes penetrate the
organisation of health care itself.
This report will detail the preliminary results that can be drawn from the research carried out
between March 2013 and March 2014). In the following we give a general introduction to the
project’s research theme, and then report results according to the above detailed work
packages.
1. Introduction: standardization and organisational learning in child health
Child health and community-based health approaches
While in Uganda the under-five child (U5) mortality rates remain among the highest in the
world, Rwanda recently reported one of the steepest declines of child death ever recorded,
approximating the world’s average of 51 deaths per 1,000 live births.1 In both countries
substantial interventions were initiated towards reducing child mortality over the past two
decades. According to the World Health Organisation (2013), half of U5 child deaths are due
to pneumonia (17%), malaria (13%), diarrhoea (10%), HIV/AIDS (7%), and newborn sepsis
(5%). Health facilities in Uganda and Rwanda have long been inequitably distributed, with
more facilities and trained staff in urban than rural areas. Therefore, health facility-based
services alone have been assumed to be unable to offer timely treatment particularly for
childhood illnesses (MoH Uganda iCCM Guidelines 2010). This recognition has fostered an
emphasis on involving communities themselves in health service delivery to increase access
to care especially among U5s. This project studies three global health technologies that are
aimed to address child mortality and health on community level, and that have in recent
years changed diagnostic and therapeutic agencements in many sub-Saharan African
1
Numbers for Uganda are reported as 178 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 90 per 1,000 live births in 2011. In
Rwanda 154 deaths per 1,000 live births were reported in 1990, while in 2011 56 per 1,000 live births were
counted (UNICEF et al. 2012).
78
countries: the introduction of rapid diagnostic tests for malaria, (electronic) health data
recording, and the integrated community case management technique.
Improving child health on community level has a long history in international efforts to
improve health services. In order to understand the particular form contemporary
agencements take it is important to trace the history and development of the technologies. In
the following we therefore give a short report of our library investigation to delineate the
genealogy of child and community health interventions. After that we report on the results of
our four work packages. In the 1960s and the 1970s a number of initiatives in the Global
South emerged to tackle the lack of health services mostly in the rural areas of the so-called
developing countries. A number of these experiments from Bangladesh, China, Cuba,
Tanzania, Sudan, or Venezuela started to circulate in scientific journals and policy reports
(Benyoussef & Christian 1977; Bennett 1979; Hall & Taylor 2003). In the early 1970s the
case of China’s “barefoot doctors” was in particular prominent, when numerous articles by
influential scholars appeared in well-known medical journals. The barefoot doctors in China
were described as a new form of “cooperative medicine” and, as some argue, would be the
“model [that] became internationally renowned in public health and health development
circles, and served as the inspiration for the World Health Organization’s Primary Health
Care Initiative” (White 1998: 480). And indeed the description of the barefoot doctors as
“decentralized, deprofessionalized, grassroot-based, egalitarian, low-tech, economically
feasible, and cultural appropriate” (White 1998: 480), stand in close connection of what later
would be known as the Primary Health Care approach. The prominence of the Chinese
barefoot doctors2 and a number of other examples gave rise – both on academic and on
political agendas – to a new discussion on how access to health care services should be
organized. A report, that was published in 1975 by the WHO and UNICEF (Djukanovic &
Mach 1975), argued that what these successful approaches had in common was, “that they
started from where people lived and that there was active participation of selected health
workers” (Bemmett 1979: 508). In terms of the organization of health services, this implied a
call for a decentralized organization, which urged for shifting capacities and responsibilities to
the local level. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International
Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) acknowledge this discussion in 1978, when hundreds
of delegates of the now seminal conference in Alma-Ata not only negotiated existing health
ideologies, but also sought for tangible solutions of how to improve the health of
communities. The conference’s resolutions that were published in the Alma-Ata declaration
called for a political push to provide “health for all by the year 2000” and acknowledged the
2
Useful discussions on the barefoot doctors in China can be found in Sidel 1972, Hsu 1974, Li 1975 and Wihte 1998.
79
experiences from the ground. The Alma-Ata declaration was the basis of what came to be
known as Primary Health Care (PHC)3. “The long and difficult road” (Litsios 2002) to the
conference was marked by political, personal and institutional ideologies. Yet, the 134
countries and 67 international participant organizations of the Alma-Ata conference initiated
the first global call for actions on health that made health not just a fundamental human right,
which needed to be tackled globally, it also urged for new instruments to do so: The
Declaration of Primary Health Care and the goal of “Health for All in the year 2002”
advocated an “inter-sectoral” and multidimensional approach to health and socioeconomic
development, emphasized the use of “appropriate technology”, and urged active community
participation in health care and health education at every level” (Brown, Cueto & Fee 2006:
67).
The introduction of Primary Health Care consequently was a call for novel ways to provide
access to health and institutionalized community health services as a technology that would
operationalize this claim. The numerous initiatives and solutions that emerged after the
conference particularly referred to the participatory approach that was advocated in the
Alma-Ata declaration. Capital III of the declaration reads: “The people have the right and duty
to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health
care” (Alma-Ata declaration capital III of the 1978). This raised a need for action on health at
community level in order to increase access to healthcare. The new political contexts that
were marked by decolonized nations, the spread of nationalist and socialist movements,
competing theories of development, or the emphasis on new low-cost technologies that
promise to implement long-term socio-economic growth (Brown, Cueto & Fee 2006: 66) are
inscribed and problematized in the idea of community health services.
However, Primary Health Care received criticism soon after its emergence. In particular,
Primary Health Care was seen as too undirected to address specific diseases effectively,
and the community services proved difficult to run sustainably, many health volunteer
networks for instance disappeared again shortly after they were established (Walt year?). In
1979 the Rockefeller Foundation hosted a conference in Bellagio, Italy, to address a number
of concerns. As a result, a modified approach coined as Selective Primary Health Care
(SPHC) was introduced. This reduced model argued that the limited resources available
should target at services “to the few most important diseases” as “the most effective means
of improving the health of the greatest number of people” (Walsh & Warren 1980: 152).
3
“Primary Health Care is essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and
technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation and at a
cost that the community and country can afford to maintain at every stage of their development in the spirit of self-reliance
and self-determination. It forms an integral part both of the country’s health system, of which it is the central function and
main focus, and of the overall social and economic development of the community. It is the first level of contact of
individuals, and the family with the national health system bringing health care as close as possible to where people live
and work, and constitutes the first element of a continuing care process” (Alma-Ata 1978 declaration capital VI).
80
Providing a number of techniques that concentrated on infant and child death institutionalized
special Primary Health Care shortly after. It was argued that growth monitoring, oral
rehydration, breastfeeding, and immunization (GOBI) would not only more feasible than
comprehensive primary health care it would also be “the most cost-effective type of medical
intervention” (Walsh & Warren 1979: 979). The most interesting point about this controversy
between Primary Health Care and Special Primary Health Care is the disagreement on how
health interventions should be organized. While comprehensive PHC advocated a horizontal
approach that shifts responsibilities to communities, Special Primary Health Care situated the
decision-making powers as vertical, back into the realm of medical professions, foreign
consultants and health experts (Unger & Killingsworth 1986). Both approaches, however,
would perpetuate the focus to target communities and involve them in health provision. But
the question who would have the authority to decide what issues will be relevant and how
they would be tackled remained contested.
The Millennium Development Goals: standardization, evidence and epidemiology
By the mid 1990s it was clear that the goal to achieve access to health for all by 2000 as
articulated at the Alma-Ata conference was not possible to reach. This was partly due to the
fact that the HIV pandemic and the focus on other infectious diseases diverted international
attention to comprehensive approaches to health. Calls by the international community to
political leaders to recommit were getting louder and in September 2000, during the United
Nations Millennium Summit, 147 heads of states came together “to make a [new] promise”.
During this event ‘the world’ agreed on eight goals that became known as the Millennium
Development Goals or MDGs. The MDGs were designed to address what was at the time
seen as the “major challenges ahead”, namely 1) poverty, 2) access to education, 3) gender
equality, 4) child mortality, 5) maternal health, 6) HIV/AIDS and other diseases, 7)
environmental sustainability, and 8) global partnership4. As argued above the formulation of
the MDGs was not the first time global targets had been articulated5. But what the MDGs
particularly stand for is a new expression of a paradigm in development policies and
interventions that speaks directly to human lives rather than focusing on general economic or
political development models.
We cannot provide a comprehensive analysis of the health-related MDGs in this report, but
would like to briefly draw out three important characteristics of the MDGs’ logic that relate to
our project. Firstly, the MDGs proliferate a numerical logic. All of the eight goals are linked to
specific numerical targets to be achieved by 2015. It is these numerical targets that make
4 For an excellent history oft he MDGs see Hulme 2009 and 2008.
5
The Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, for example, states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living
adequate for the heath and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and
medical care” (UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25).
81
standardization and medical data infrastructures a crucial part of the MDG efforts. Secondly,
these numerical and temporally bound targets enable the MDGs’ success or failure to be
clearly measurable. After the formulation of the MDGs in 2000 a number of technologies that
operationalize the goals as concrete interventions have been developed and are being tested
by governmental and non-governmental organizations globally. Those that prove to be
successful in pilot programmes are then promoted by international donor organizations, such
as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, UNICEF or the United Nations
Development Program. These global health technologies circulate through reports and
manuals for policy makers and practitioners. Most importantly they institutionalize the
numerical logic of the MDGs, stating that successful interventions are those that directly
influence one ore more indicators in question, measured and represented almost exclusively
through quantifiable means. Secondly then, the MDGs thus are run on an evidence-based
development logic, which assumes that interventions can be linked closely to numerical
indicators, and be accounted through data collection on these indicators. This makes the
MDGs a vertical, indicator-focused strategy that relies on technologies enabling standardised
diagnostic and treatment protocols, as well as medical data recording infrastructures. Thirdly,
the MDGs are vertical health interventions in the sense that they address specific indicators
and diseases in order to bring mortality rates down most effectively. The focus is on the
epidemiologically most relevant diseases, “the big killers”, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria,
tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrhoea. Emphasis is thus not on building comprehensive
health systems or on fostering general health (as for instance earlier primary health care
approaches were), but rather on avoiding death. They thus draw on and are infused by an
epidemiological logic that plots out mortality and survival rates for specific diseases, and
focuses attention on the statistically most relevant diseases. Consequently, the MDGs are
not simple objectified targets, but rather are based on and create a sophisticated
infrastructure where people, knowledge, politics and technologies are connected and
circulate in particular ways.
After this report on our library work, in what follows we now move on to report on our results
concerning three of these technologies that are particularly designed to reduce child mortality
and provide access to health. Analytically we focus on the technologies’ capacity to
standardise and record diagnosis and treatment, as well as on organisational learning that
the technologies are a result of, or result in. Work package I reports on new diagnostic
agencements, work package II on new, so-called integrated approaches to increase access
to treatment for the most prevalent and dangerous childhood illnesses, and work package III
addresses the implementation of extensive medical data collection that accompanies the
diagnostic and treatment interventions.
82
2 Results of the Work Packages
2.1 Work package I: new diagnostic agencements
Research team: Umlauf , Beisel, Schräpel
Fieldwork times and activities:
-
4 month field stay in Uganda
-
20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Health Workers of Health Centre II and
Health Centre III
-
Participant observation in 8 health centres in Mukono District
-
3 Focus-group discussions with Health Workers and Patients
-
10 Expert interviews
As tools of progress, technologies of standardization in Global Health are meant to increase
rationalization, and come with strong and explicit presuppositions about their impact,
functionality as well as applicability. Their utility is predefined and they are assumed to be
relatively robust to fit in and withstand various deployment contexts. These assumptions
have been particularly stated for Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs) for malaria, in which
features like high mobility, ease of use in comparison to other diagnostic technologies (e.g.
microscopy), and the rapid provision of results shape it into an (assumedly) appropriate
technology. From a global health policy standpoint, standardization of diagnosis of malaria
through widespread use of RDTs in Rwanda and Uganda works towards at least three
(interrelated) goals: (i) RDTs stabilize biomedical notions of malaria in remote settings and
against local beliefs and disease patterns; (ii) distribution of RDTs helps to provide equal
service to all parts of the population; (iii) on an organisational level RDT results enable
Ministries of Health to determine the true prevalence of malaria and how the disease affects
health care services in both countries.
History and Development of tests and testing
The emergence of RDTs for malaria has to be situated in a broader context of both
tests/testing for other diseases but also other societal and historical constellations. As has
been observed a while ago testing and the discourse of tests are increasingly prevalent in
modern societies e.g. IQ tests, pregnancy tests, tests for radioactivity (Pinch 1993). In this
line of thought it seems little surprising that testing plays a crucial role in Global Health most
prominently enacted for the testing for HIV/Aids. But the focus on tests and testing as a
standard procedure for poor populations also produces new visibilities like the neglect and
lack of testing for non-communicable diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer, hypertension) in most
83
of the low resource countries. In the case of malaria the development of tests follows a dual
historical trajectory: Studies of micro-biological principles of antibody-antigen reaction can be
traced back until the 1960s. It was during the 80s that vaccine trials considered the
introduction of the tests as a research instrument that would help prove efficacy quicker and
more cost efficient than microscopy. But there is also a military dimension to it – which
follows in line with characterization of malaria as a war disease – as the first test that was
prequalified by the FDA was developed with the help of the Walter-Reed Army institute.
Logic of RDTs & new uncertainties
In direct comparison with testing for HIV – people don’t get tested because they feel like
having HIV – testing for malaria is not only done repeatedly and frequently but also because
people think and feel they are suffering from malaria.
As our empirical findings show the use of the tests particularly in lower level facilities
introduce new uncertainties. One of the most noticeable uncertainty appears when clinical
diagnosis/self diagnosis and parasite-based diagnoses do not match from providers as well
as from patient’s perspective. Non-adherence to negative test results with the subsequent
prescription of an antimalarial shows Health Workers attempts to navigate and negotiate this
new uncertainty, which is most prevalent in the case of febrile children.
Another uncertainty emerges in relation to the widespread practice of self-medication. Fever
associated with malaria most often occurs during night when no health centre or transport is
available. People start treatment at home most often with leftovers from unfinished
antimalarial dosages. This type of under-dosing of drugs doesn’t clear parasites from the
blood but even if these are cleared the tests antigen/antibody reaction could show positive up
to 4 weeks after treatment. This shows how the use of the tests can also lead to
mistreatment particularly because the course of action in case of a positive test result is
rarely scrutinized.
But even if negative tests results are accepted (over-)prescription with other drugs especially
antibiotics constitutes what can be labelled a shift of problem to another public health sphere.
Certainty enacted by the tests – either way if positive or negative – is assumed to replace the
a widespread practice in tropical medicine to always provide the strongest treatment
available to cope with severity of the diseases. In contrast the introduction of RDTs can also
be seen as enactment of Occam’s razor theorem in tropical medicine in which practitioners
search for the fewest possible causes that will account for the symptoms.
RDTs as technologies of standardization
84
One of our findings on a population (or data-) level, indicates that various forms of
organisational learning interact and even conflict with each other in complex and at times
unpredictable ways. While nation-wide collection of RDTs results (via mobile phones) has
improved measurability of malaria prevalence it has also revealed a (increasing) gap
between positive RDT results and the amount of anti-malarial drugs prescribed. The
discrepancy between the test result and the drugs given has triggered organisational learning
that focuses either on scientific solutions (e.g. more research into febrile diseases) or on
technical fixes (e.g. introduction of new tests like Positive Control Wells). What goes
unaddressed by these forms of Global Health learning are local forms of organisational
learning that are partially causing the gap between the two technologies at stake: RDTs were
initially meant to serve all lower-level health facilities where no parasite-based diagnosis was
available. In reality, however, tests are also used in laboratories of higher-level facilities like
hospitals, which in turn causes stock-outs of RDTs in lower-level health centres. While this
prioritisation of fields of application of RDTs on an organisational level (Ministry of Health)
adheres to the hierarchy of the Ugandan health system, it conflicts with the assumed
standardizing capacities and implicit egalitarian claims of widespread use of the technology.
At this stage we are able to show how the distribution of a standardizing technology again
(re-)enacts inequalities in the provision of health care service.
RDTs as research & data instrument
Despite all uncertainties enacted by RDTs one of the most noticeable examples of the
widespread use of tests is their role of producing reliable epidemiological data. In
combination with the installation of new data processing infrastructures (e.g. mTrac)
reporting of positive cases serves as new statistical baseline for making new claims on
prevalence of the disease in a given territory. Subsequently the argument becomes
politicised in terms of success achieved in comparison to the rough estimations and
unreliable data collection of the last 30 years or so. While only 5 years ago the WHO
estimated more than 500 million cases per year world wide quiet recently new extrapolations
simulated that 250 million would be a more realistic figure (WHO 2010). While this can be
propagated as a success of global malaria control efforts, it also raises new concerns what
other diseases constitute for the other 250 million cases: What is done with the cases that
were thought to be malaria? The recent shift of focus in the global attention to so-called “nonmalarial febrile illnesses” and the increasing research on diagnostic solutions for these new
epistemological spaces not only hints to a complex empirical phenomenon but also cautions
us to rethink our conceptual premises.
A negative RDT result and the subsequent action of sending patients away without giving
any treatment poses a potential threat to the scope as well as the stability of biomedical
85
networks/therapeutic agencements. This course of action alludes to some limitations in
classic network approaches in explaining more gradual forms of exclusionary and
inclusionary effects. Sending patients away without giving any treatment can produce hybrid
actors, which are on the one hand excluded from the formal biomedical network. On the
other hand, given the course of action taken by many of these patients –buying anti-malarial
treatment in private drug shops – includes them in a broader informal therapeutic
agencements. Therefore, increasing resources for research on “non-malarial febrile
illnesses” can be read as another, and crucial, form of organizational learning to better cope
with the hybrid status of patients with negative RDTs.
RDTs & (de)skilling of Health Workers
The introduction of novel technology needs also to be linked to the questions of
professionalism and aspects of skilling and deskilling. In the case of RDTs both aspects can
be observed not only on an individual level (Health Worker) but also across the structure of
health care system in place. One major biomedical aim of widespread use of tests is their
potential to standardize diagnostic services throughout a therapeutic agencement by at the
same time addressing the problem of lack of human resources (e.g. laboratory personal).
A two-day training substitutes for two or more years of studying microbiology and
parasitology. The black boxing of the tests scientific principles and inscribed high-tech can
also strike back in form non-adherence to negative test results. The test’s simplicity is both a
reason to connect hard to reach populations to parasitological diagnosis but at the same time
a cause for non-adherence to (negative) test results, as most users are not familiar with the
inscribed scientific principles. However as our findings show for Health Workers in lower level
facilities without laboratory services the use of the tests is generally experienced as an
increase in (biomedical) expertise.
On the other hand introduction of the tests into the laboratories of higher-level facilities
makes personnel experience their work as under-complex and a potential for new
frustrations, which than again might affect their capacities and willingness to use the time
gained for other tasks and diseases. In the case of community health workers the use of the
tests can be again seen as increase in professionalism. Interestingly in comparison
adherence of CHW to (negative) test results is normally higher than for Health Workers.
Their lack of experience with clinical diagnosis and also the lower workload might be reasons
for this. But their professionalism also depends on other mobilities as well as expertise on
higher levels patients with negative results are referred to.
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2.2 Work package II: access to treatment and organisational learning
Research team: Beisel, Muyinda, Schräpel, Umlauf
Fieldwork times and activities
-
3 weeks of fieldwork in Rwanda were carried out in August 2013
-
4 weeks of fieldwork were carried out in Uganda and Rwanda in February and March
2014
-
ongoing part-time fieldwork is being carried out in Uganda
-
Qualitative research was undertaken (interviews, participant observation, collection of
documents) with Community Health Workers, Health Managers in Health Centres,
and in District Hospitals
-
6 Community Health Workers (CHWs) interviews, 1 health provider (a nurse
from the health centre), and 5 group discussions (3 for women, 2 for men) with
community members were conducted
-
2 regional workshops (one for Central and another for Western region)
organized by the MoH for an evaluation report on iCCM activities in Uganda
were attended.
-
UB was on maternity leave 15/3/13-15/3/14, which means this work package draws
on comparatively little empirical research until now. The results in this section have
thus to be read as preliminary and focus mainly on the conceptual and historical
background of iCCM as a global health technology.
History and development of iCCM
This work package investigates strategies to improve access to treatment for malaria,
pneumonia and diarrhoea through the introduction of integrated community case
management (iCCM). Offering simple and cost-effective interventions, iCCM is now globally
accepted as the most powerful strategy for reducing U5 mortality (WHO/UNICEF 2012). The
strategy was first introduced in several high disease burden countries in sub-Saharan Africa
including Mali, Niger, Ghana, Senegal, DRC, Malawi, Ethiopia and Mozambique, and is
currently scaled up and implemented in most sub-Saharan Africa (Oliver et al 2012). The
introduction of iCCM can be seen as a result of organisational learning, as the strategy (i)
was the result of renewed attention to the potential of community-based approaches to
increase access to treatment and decrease child mortality rates, (ii) in recognition that most
malarial fevers are treated at home, and (iii) is linked to new scientific findings that
widespread use of RDTs have enabled.
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(i) The development of iCCM was prompted by renewed attention to the potential of
community-based interventions to increase access to health for so-called hard-to-reach
populations. Community-based approaches to health care provision played an important role
in primary health care provision in the decade following the Alma Ata Declaration in the 1970.
However, after the broad-based introduction of community health workers to provide a wide
range of health services, “questions have been raised about these programmes and the
extent to which community health workers have become ‘just another pair of hands’ ” (Walt
1990). In the following decade funding schemes for primary health care slowly but surely
diminished and with it community health worker networks became inactive or “failed” as Walt
puts it (ibid.). Today’s interest in community-based health provision is motivated by similar
reasons than the earlier primary health approaches, however with notable differences. In
2004 WHO and UNICEF issued a statement underlining the importance of community
approaches in the treatment of diarrhoea and pneumonia (UNICEF 2012).
(ii) Secondly, this coincided with the publication of studies showing that most malaria cases
are indeed treated at home (refs, Brown etc). As a result, iCCM has since 2004 been part of
the portfolio of WHO and UNICEF’s activities in many sub-Saharan African countries
(UNICEF 2012). iCCM has thus been introduced as a response to deficiencies of vertical
health interventions focused on one disease. However, it does not approach child health in
its entirety as primary health care providers in the 1970s community health worker
programmes did, but focuses on specific parts of child health, namely the three diseases
tuberculosis, malaria and diarrhoea. In this sense the history of community health workers
and their renewed incorporation into public health care through iCCM approaches can be
read as a case of organisational learning within public health. However, as horizontal primary
health care approaches achieved only modest success and their effects were difficult to
sustain, global public health strategies turned to vertical disease-specific interventions in the
1990s. Today, 30 years later it is widely acknowledged that vertical interventions come with
unwanted side-effects too, and the concept of 'integration' is meant to make an in-between of
horizontal and vertical approaches work. Integrated community case management addresses
three specific diseases, and in this sense remains vertical, but at the same time focuses on
their interactions, a strength of horizontal approaches. Symptom overlaps that constitute a
potential stumbling block for vertical approaches, are thus rendered productive through the
notion and practice of the integration of care. At the same time though, ICCM does not
address child health in its entirety, but restricts itself to the treatment of pneumonia, malaria
and diarrhoea. This leaves a wide range of childhood diseases unaddressed, and raises the
question of how care is organised for patients that present with other illnesses. ICCM
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manuals state that these patients are to be referred to a health facility, however in practice
many patients do not follow the referral advice, return home and treat the child with
paracetamol or herbal medicines. At this point it is important to add another layer of the
ICCM logic, namely its relation to global health goals, most prominently the Millennium
Development Goals. The MDGs aim to reduce child mortality, and this is exactly what ICCM
addresses. It has been shown in epidemiological research that pneumonia, malaria and
diarrhoea account for the biggest share of child mortality, and thus a focus on these three
diseases makes epidemiological sense. In summary, we can see that ICCM operates to an
epidemiological logic, strategically focusing on three major killer diseases and their
interactions, as this promises to minimise mortality rates most effectively. In this sense the
organisational learning that triggered the rise of ICCM approaches, pertains to the
deficiencies of both horizontal and vertical approaches, as well as to global targets on child
mortality reduction. ICCM can thus be understood as a new technology that is meant to
mediate shortcomings and harness advantages of both vertical and horizontal approaches.
(iii) However, new evidence that the introduction of RDTs provides, complicates this logic. As
Work Package I and III elaborate the confluence of the new diagnostic possibilities coming
with RDTs and increased efforts to report and process malaria cases on national and
international level, have led to the introduction of a new disease category. The broad
implemention of RDTs in health facilities made visible that a high proportion of fever cases
that used to be ascribed to malaria and treated accordingly, in fact tested negative for
malaria.6 Cases that test negative for malaria despite malaria symptoms have as a result
been labelled as non-malarial febrile illnesses' (NMFI) or ‘acute febrile syndrome’ (AFS).
AFSs and NMFIs are categories that subsume undefined viral and bacterial infections. Again,
iCCM was identified by the WHO malaria programme and associated partners as a viable
strategy to address these non-malarial fevers, assuming that many AFS and NMFI cases are
due to pneumonia or diarrhoea. As a result iCCM has since 2013 received increased
attention from the WHO malaria programme (WHO consultation, 2013). One expert from
WHO explained the attention of the malaria programme to non-malarial fevers as follows: “it
is a problem we created, so we need to address this now”. Thus, since a malaria control
intervention made the existence and high prevalence of acute febrile syndrome visible, it has
been subsumed under the duties of the WHO malaria programme to not only define but also
to find ways to address this new visibility. Thus, although the malaria programme did not
6
The figure that 20% of all tested cases turn out positive was mentioned to us by all policymakers we spoke to,
but no reference to a study was provided. The number rather appears to come from an early RDT trial, where
one national malaria control programme wrote to FIND and WHO stating that the tests must be faulty since
only 20% are testing positive.
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introduce iCCM as a strategy, it nevertheless has been instrumental in iCCM gaining
momentum and importance as one of the global health strategies for access to treatment.
Similarly in Uganda, iCCM has grown out of positive experiences of Home Based
Management of Malaria (HBMF) of 2002, in which trained community drug distributors (DDs)
treated U5 children with fever using pre-packed, colour-coded and easily administered
combination of chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (fansidar) pack (HOMAPAK).
The finding that HBMF was effective in reaching 60% of U5 children with fever [Fapohunda
et al, 2004] triggered interest in integrating treatment of other common childhood diseases
(Acute Respiratory Infections - ARI and diarrhoea) in home care, and was piloted in Home
Based Care (malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia, and malnutrition) in the post-conflict northern
region of Uganda [MoH, 2008]. The evaluation of HBMF and HBC programs showed that
communities valued and used services provided by fellow community members, and the
evidence was used to advocate for and initiate iCCM. In Uganda, iCCM program was
introduced in July 2010 with the aim of building capacities of CHWs known as iCCM Village
Health Team (iCCM VHT) members to offer treatment for childhood illness in communities
and mobilize communities to utilize the services [MoH ICCM Guidelines, 2010]. Again, iCCM
can here be read as an instance of organisational learning, where the responsibilities of one
division get extended as the clinical landscape is redefined by the use of a new technology.
However, in how far, iCCM with its rather limited focus will be able to address the newly
visible disease category, remains to be seen.
Fragmentation, integration and organisational learning
Our research in Uganda has shown that although there is a unified national guideline for
iCCM (Uganda MoH, 2010), different implementation models persist. This is due to the fact
that the Ugandan government has adopted a decentralized7, public-private partnership
approach in implementation; namely it hands over the responsibility for iCCM implementation
to different iNGOs and private practitioners. The implementing partners operate at regional
level and include UNICEF, Malaria Consortium, USAID, EIP, and UNICEF among others. We
found that although all partners implemented iCCM, the versions of the programme diverged
slightly from implementation partner to implementation partner. iNGOs used their work in
Uganda to experiment with their organisation’s own (international) version of iCCM, rather
than implementing national guidelines. For instance, there were trials with drug shop
operators as iCCM focal person, rather than working with village health teams (VHTs
7 Uganda has decentralized health services to sub-national levels (districts) in accordance with the Local
Government Act (1997), leaving the responsibility of policy formulation, setting standards and guidelines,
supervision and monitoring, and resource mobilization with the MoH [MoH/HSSP III, 2010].
90
consisting of four – five people) as the national implementation guidelines suggest. iNGOs
thus stayed consistent to their overall strategy, rather than with the Ugandan strategy. It is
important to note that the national strategy has to be understood not as a unique national
strategy, but is heavily influenced (if not identical) from the vision of iCCM that it is promoted
by UNICEF and WHO.
Similarily, in a recent evaluation report of the Ugandan government it was emphasised that
iNGOs largely disregarded the existing health system, and as such iCCM was often not
integrated in the national health system. The activities and strategies of different actors
involved were hardly integrative, and often operated parallel to each other. For instance,
iCCM and the activities of the implementing partner were not included in the District’s work
plan and budgets. The fragmentation of services was also evident in medical supplies. ICCM
medicines were not incorporated in the district credit line as had been planned; partners
procured and distributed medicines to VHTs in a parallel supply system in most of the
implementing districts. Special stock cards were designed for HWs to record iCCM
medicines supplied to VHTs and there was a separate medicine audit. Implementing partners
explained that drugs were directly supplied to VHTs to minimize drug leakage during chronic
ACTs shortage in public health facilities. Supervision reports were not shared with the
districts and health facilities, so that very little information was circulating. Implementation is
decentralized (district based), however, this has been much affected by subdividing of
districts. In the recent years it has been common practice to subdivide districts to create
political constituencies, this practice particularly happens close to presidential elections, and
in the (often rather hasty) process some districts ended up with less than the required
number of health workers. This happened because the geographical distribution of health
centres did not map onto the new district division, and thus some health facilities that served
one district, are now located in areas that became part of another new district. As a result
some areas did not have health facilities to supervise and facilitate the (iCCM) Village Health
Teams (VHT) activities.
Furthermore, VHTs and iCCM activities were not seen as community owned by the
communities themselves, but were associated with the implementing partners’ (IRC, PACE,
Malaria Consortium, etc) activities. This shift can be seen in VHTs, who started asking for
payment because they perceived themselves as helpers to the implementing partners, and
not the community. Other VHTs using the skills they acquired in the management of illnesses
and the administration of medicines, started own business of treating people in their villages
and setting up of drug shops. The VHTs have learned that the iNGOs do not commit for
longer periods of time, but will leave once their iCCM project has finished, leaving the VHTs
without purpose, or (the often hoped for) employment resulting from the voluntary activity. In
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other words, the VHTs learned that the organisations and state health actors can both not be
relied upon, and they turn to social entrepreneurship instead – a practice of individual (rather
than organisational) learning.
In contrast, in Rwanda iCCM is being implemented to a centralized national model,
orchestrated and controlled by the MoH. Although international partners are involved in iCCM
too, they are more strictly bound to conforming to national standards. One of our empirical
insights that illustrate the differences between Uganda and Rwanda concerns data
management. While in Rwanda data collection and reporting activities by community health
workers are a fully integrated part of the Health Management Information System (HMIS), in
Uganda the collection of indicators for ICCM did not function consistently. Community Health
Workers in Rwanda produce a number of indicators that are reported to the health center on
a monthly basis. Data managers of health facilities are responsible to assemble this data in
the monthly HMIS report. This includes indicators on diagnosing childhood illnesses,
antenatal and postnatal care, gender based violence, nutrition screening, referrals, to only
name a few. Every health facility in the country is producing an eleven pages report using
data produced by the different departments of the health facility and by the community health
workers. In Rwanda this reporting network is highly integrative and efficiently entangles
different places, people and institutions to one apparatus (in this case HMIS). The iCCM data
management and reporting system in Uganda was not integrated in the national Health
Management Information System (HMIS).
However, we argue that both of these approaches have the potential to foster their own
version of organisational learning. Rwanda’s integrated data collection and consistent iCCM
model makes international comparisons with other iCCM implementation partners, as well as
a systematic evaluation of the ‘international’ model of iCCM (that is the model of WHO and
UNICEF) possible. As the national evaluation of iCCM of the Ugandan Ministry of Health
shows, the fragmented approach has its problems in implementation and sustainability of
measures, but enables a different kind of organisational learning. The different models and
slightly diverging approaches to iCCM are testiment to an experimental ethos in international
health projects, from which the Ugandan evaluation can draw their own conclusion; because
they are able to compare a variety of iCCM practices and creative adaptations.
With regards to the notion of ‘integration’, the results in this work package make it clear that
iCCM has to be understood as integration in three main senses. Firstly, it aims to ‘integrate’
three diseases in one organisational model of diagnosis and treatment. Secondly, it aims to
integrate symptom overlaps (of mainly febrile illnesses) and makes diagnosis travel between
different disease categories. Thirdly, iCCM in itself is integrated and majorly contributes to
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the collection of medical data on childhood diseases. The latter point becoming particular
visible when understanding that their monthly reports play a major role for an important part
of the Health Management Information System (HMIS), collecting data for numerous
indicators referring to community health service. In addition to that, community health
workers are elected by their communities and seen as trustable and educated people. At
organizational level all community health workers in Rwanda are part of a cooperative where
the incentives paid by the Ministry of Health are invested in small enterprises (e.g. pork farms
or taxis). This creates additional forms of belongings institutionalized through performance
contracts (imhigo) and expectations in future economical benefits.
iCCM and (de)skilling of health workers
Training in use of RDTs for diagnosis of malaria given to VHTs significantly recudes the work
of nurses and medical assistants, as well as laboratory technicians in health facilities, and
was by some seen as a way of making them redundant. For instance, using an RDT picture
guide, VHTs perform tests on their clients, distribute medicines in the community, use
treatment algorithm to assess and manage childhood illnesses, and learn how to use pictorial
registers. However, it remains unclear in how far VHTs can substitute for professional staff at
health facilities. For instance, district evaluation reports indicated that training should have
been longer than what was offered, which made VHTs themselves and some community
members doubt the VHTs’ competence in performing RDTs, others doubt the technical
capacity of the test itself: “I suggest that RDT should be improved because in most cases
when VHTs do the test, it may not detect malaria but when the child is taken to the HF,
malaria is diagnosed” (Local Leader Kibaale).
2.3 Work package III: Institutionalisation of medical data management
Research team: Schräpel, Umlauf , Beisel
Fieldwork times and activities:
-
Three months of fieldwork were conducted in Rwanda in August-September 2013
and in March 2014
-
The main field sites for this research are in Mayange (Bugesera District), Kibuye
(Karongi District) and Kigali
-
Qualitative research was undertaken (interviews, participant observation, collection of
documents) with Community Health Workers, in Health Centres, and in District
Hospitals
-
Approximately 48 formal interviews and numerous informal interviews
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-
12 Focus Group Discussions with patients
This work package investigates how the institutionalisation of new medical data
infrastructures is rearranging the organisation of health (in particular maternal-child health
and malaria) in Uganda and Rwanda. During the last decade national and international
actors in health invested in the instalment of new medical data infrastructures to specifically
address health issues. New (and older) technologies (e.g. register books, forms, lists, and
databases) are supposed to promote efficiency, accuracy and accountability within health
systems and improve the quality of care. This problematization of health (e.g. overcoming
lacks of data, gaining accessible data, having good data, etc.) can be read as the local
rendering of a continually growing global emphasis on medical information systems in the
reorganization and ‘rationalization’ of health care. The work package is particular interested
in the modes of ordering these infrastructures produce by using medical data to measure
achievements, make different parts of the world comparable, and to test the efficacy of tools.
Consequently, the ethnographic material resolves around i) the role of medical data for
national and global health interventions; ii) data infrastructures and their standardising
qualities for medical practices; and iii) the how medical data allows collective action. The
case studies follow the paths of medical data to the places where they are produced, stored
and processed – to local health facilities; the work of community health workers; ministries
and global health reports – in order to document the practices that emerge around and with
them.
By focusing on the production of medical data and the devices used for that – that we call
technologies of inscription – we are able to trace how global initiatives, like the Millennium
Development Goals, are translated to particular contexts and vice versa, how these global
initiatives are shaped by local translations. Technologies of inscription, in the most generals
sense, have the quality to turn “pieces of matter” into “written documents” (Latour & Woolgar
1979: 51). In addition they are shaped by social forces and thus loaded, or ‘inscribed’, with
epistemic, normative and other rules. In this sense inscription also refers to “the way
technical artefacts embody patterns of use” (Akrich 1992: 205). Conceptualised in this sense
technologies of inscription reveal “practices […] that occur in interstitial spaces – neither
entirely where the model ostensibly originated nor entirely where it is supposed to be
implemented” (Rottenburg 2009: xiv). This operationalization makes it possible to study
ethnographic tangible objects (e.g. a particular data reporting form) at a particular site to
address a larger issue (e.g. global health).
History and Development
94
A first observation on the role of data is that bio/medical practice and the organisation of
health were and are strongly depending on the production of medical data. Many of the
therapeutic interventions and decision-making processes in medicine are in need of data that
carefully monitors the reaction of a body to a drug, the effects of a particular intervention, or
simply to know about the circumstances patients live in and seek for health, to only name a
few. The unavailability of data in contexts like Rwanda and Uganda challenges international
and national actors for the organisation of health and the quality of care. Not surprisingly
thus, that the last two decades broad huge efforts in (global) health to introduce new medical
data infrastructures. Secondly, medical data and their infrastructures are about more than
simply documenting and quantifying the work of health systems. On the ground, where data
is produced, collecting data are means to develop and maintain health standard and
standardization. And finally, when data starts to travel to different site they need to be
transcended form its locality to become part of ‘global knowledge’. In this sense medical data
do not just become constitutive agents on the ground but are also associating local practices
to (global) infrastructures. The findings from this work package show how a new epistemic
regime in global health is abstracting medicine in objectified statements and numerical
representations. In Rwanda some of the health personnel exacerbate this organizational
realm by stating: “you do not work, when you are not reporting”.
(i) Data and the organisation of health
There is a big interest by international and national health actors to evaluate how particular
interventions make a difference over time and space. This is not just to identify the best
possible tools, but also to create forms of accountability and transparency, particularly to
allow partnerships between global actors (often from Euro-America) and particular local
interventions. This focus on data has consequences on the organisation of health on different
levels: Firstly, what counts and what not in (global) health is very much defined by global
targets and indicators. Donor money gets directed to achieve predefined goals, national
policies are formulated around globally circulating suggestions, and local interventions are
almost exclusively designed for achieving these global agendas (see description on MDGs
above).
Secondly, in the past data was almost exclusively produced by international organisations.
This is starting to shift with a growing emphasis on local bureaucracies and the availability of
cheaper digital solutions (ICTs). As a consequence, local actors become more confident on
the production of “own and more reliable data” and start to strategically contest existing
representations by re-counting their own stories. The new data infrastructures in place allow
a confidence and trust in own resources and this is starting to shift power relations when
negotiating donor programs or foreign dependencies. One of these public contestations
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emerged in December 2011, during a meeting in Kigali where the findings of the 2011-2012
Global Competitiveness report were discussed. The senior director of the World Economy
Forum, Jennifer Blake, pointed out that the health situation in Rwanda was still lagging
behind. For that she referred to the Malaria cases reported by the WHO that show 34,352
cases of Malaria per 100,000. The Ministry of Health (MoH), however, counts 6,000 cases of
Malaria per 100,000. In a newspaper interview Corine Karema, the Director General of the
Malaria Unit at Rwanda Biomedical Centre argued against this wrong representation on the
achievement of Malaria interventions in Rwanda. She suggested that the latest data is
available by the Ministry of Health and that this should also be used by international
organisations: “People can have access to these figures anytime since we have a functioning
Health Management Information System (HMIS) - one of the best in Africa”. These debates
occur regularly as part of public discourses or during negotiations between local
governments and international donors, expressing the wish to find own solutions for own
problems (a political agenda often coined as African Renaissance), particularly in order to
claim that donor funds should be managed directly by national governments and not by
international NGOs.
Finally, the empirical material shows how local translations to work with and on global
indicators lead to very own organisational realms, entangled in existing economical, social, or
political orders. One example for this is a closer look one of the MDG indicators. The will to
measure births attended by skilled health personnel in order to make a statement about a
health system’s ability to provide adequate care for pregnant women demonstrates the far
reaching consequences of an ’innocent’ indicator for mothers in Rwanda. In order to “work on
this indicator” pregnant women are disciplined through painful fines they need to pay when
giving birth at home and not in a health facility. This becomes possible because a number of
other institutions and actors are connected to this MDG indicator. In 2008 a law was
introduced that allows local authorities (chiefs) to enforce the monetary fine (about 10 USD)
and to imprison a women in a health facility until some of her life stock is sold (e.g. a goat or
chickens) in order to pay the fine. In addition to that, district mayors have to sign
performance contracts (imihigo) with the Rwandan president, where they state that the
majority of pregnant women in their district will give birth at health facilities. To make sure
they will achieve this, they delegate the target to executive secretaries on the cell level,
which again will make sure village chiefs, enforce the fines. The chiefs again depend on
community health workers, who regularly report on the status of pregnant women in their
community, including the number of antenatal care visits and where a woman gave births.
These processes show how a global indicator is translated through local power relations and
start to produce very own organisational logics.
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(ii) De/Skilling Health
In 2007 the Rwandan Ministry of Health started to establish an extensive network of
community health workers. Almost 45,000 people were elected nationwide by their
communities to establish a new health infrastructure that aims at providing access to
maternal-child health (i.e. a direct translation of the Millennium Development Goal 4 and 5).
As part of the de-centralization strategy of the government, these lay experts are expected to
bring access to health to places where there are little or no health infrastructures. This is only
possible through rigid regimes of standard and standardization. In the case of community
health workers, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures are translated into simple data
recoding activities. The inherent logic of that are decision trees, limiting actions to either yes
or no answers, or to a numerical representation. Low-tech diagnostic devices (e.g. timer,
RDTs) produce numerical representations that are mandatory to complete diagnostic and
treatment protocols. To diagnose pneumonia, for example, community health workers have
to count how many times children under five breath in one minute, using a small timer that
indicates the time with short beeps. Very similar to that, the MUAC tape assesses the
nutritional status of child by indicating a colour-coded number, when measuring the
circumference and the length of the upper arm. Or, to add one more of the many empirical
examples, antenatal care visits for pregnant women are translated into the numbers of visits
at the health facility that needs to be reported by the community health worker after each
visit. We understand these processes as a deskilling of health on the one hand, because
medical data reduces care to simple (numerical) representations and/or targets. On the other
hand it can also be understood as the skilling of lay experts that are enabled to diagnose and
treat patients by limiting their action to standardized procedures. Both cases reveal how
medical data is connected to care through inscribed evidence (i.e. global health standards).
In the case of Uganda, health workers performing RDTs are required to translate test results
(and so in some ways also the patient) into diagnostic registers. These documentation
practices have been an integral part of the standardizing capacities of RDTs from the very
beginning. But the filing of test results is not only supposed to enact accountability for the use
of a public/governmental technology, they also provide the link between the individual- and
population-level in the use of RDTs (see WP I). Given the general aversion and doubt
concerning the significance of documenting and accounting for their services the case study
in Uganda shows how health workers’ practices are nonetheless strongly shaped and
affected by it. The requirement of a weekly counting (and subsequent reporting) of negative
and positive RDTs results enacts a novel understanding and perception of the prevalence of
malaria. The clear-cut distinction between positive and negative cases strongly contrasts with
the assumptions and estimations when presumptive treatment following the paradigm “fever
equals malaria” was the most common diagnostic strategy. While both assumptions
97
(decrease and increase in prevalence) were present, it is likely that changing perceptions
impact health workers’ use of RDTs, the technologies standardizing capacities and their
therapeutic practices in general. This process of rendering productive technologies of
inscription can be perceived as some sort of unintended side effect. We propose to
understand adaptation as a local form of organisational learning and a way of un-blackboxing organisational practices. The stabilization of multiple understandings of prevalence of
the disease serves as an example for how “technologies acquire inscription capabilities and
begin themselves to inscribe” (Joerges/Czarniawska 1998: 373). While we can assume that
there have been multiple understandings of prevalence of malaria before the introduction of
RDTs, the evidence that the counting of positive and negative cases provide are also likely to
affect the relation between patients and health workers and their (different) understandings of
malaria.
(iii) Data & collective action
The empirical material from Rwanda on performance indicators shows how the availability of
data from different sites allows collective action between time and space (but also to the
contrary, when relations between actors are cut off, see ICCM in Uganda). One case in point
is Rwanda’s performances based financing programme. In that each health facility in the
country is assessed on a monthly basis by a small monitoring and evaluation team from the
respective district hospital. During this one-day evaluation clinical practices are rated by
triangulating the numbers in register books, forms and lists. This is not just a simple
assessment of the quality of health services, or an audit about the economical situation of a
facility. Rather, it has to be understood as a coordination of health strategies, a
demonstration of control and an educational lesson. The medical auditors give marks to
predefined indicators including the cleanness of the workspace, the quality of filled forms, the
completeness of lists, or the adherence to treatment protocols. On this basis of this
evaluation, a monthly bonus that tops up salaries is calculated. As a consequence of these
practices, the health personnel knows exactly which part of their work adds to their bonus
and thus are particularly carful with getting the papers right for activities that are rated higher
than others (e.g. partogrammes). Accordingly, the normally invisible auditors that supervise
medical practices determine part of the daily routine of health workers. What makes this
example so interesting is the fact that it makes visible how a global infrastructure (from the
MDGs to a localised medical practice) connects people, institutions, ideas, devices, and
policies over time and space. In this sense the incentives of the performance based financing
programme have to be understood as tools to create collective action between actors over
time and space. Again, this can only be understood when taking into account how these
connections are created through very specific practices (filling forms and register books,
98
monitoring the activities of health personnel, creating an extensive reporting system, etc).
This is where we see the contribution of the empirical material collected for this work
package.
3. General Summary & Outlook
As has been shown, the implementation of technologies of standardization in Uganda and
Rwanda operates along an experimental division of the (already existing) diagnostic
infrastructure. While the division between sites where no parasite-based diagnosis was
available, on the one hand, and sites where it was available through microscopy, on the
other hand, existed before, it is assumed that RDTs can be successfully introduced along
this division. Thus, standardization includes and connects new diagnostic spaces, but it
implicitly excludes other diagnostic realms (e.g. laboratories) from using RDTs as standard
diagnostic tool. As we can show for the Ugandan case, this experimental division becomes
entangled with other experiments concerning the functionality of the technology itself. The
experiments and modifications reveal that attempts to standardize bring to the fore and enact
diverging notions on how to best improve health care services on country-level.
One presupposition in Global Health follows egalitarian understandings of health to an extent
that health systems deal best with diseases when it is secured that diagnostic and
therapeutic technologies are equally distributed throughout all health care facilities of a
country. As distribution patterns of RDTs reveal, this logic is contradicted by organisational
adaptation of the technology and its subsequent introduction into new fields of use (e.g.
hospital laboratories). Stock-outs and the gap between RDTs and drugs show how
technologies of standardization, that are aimed to provide equal access, instead re-enact
inequalities and hierarchies in the provision of health care services. Furthermore, our
empirical findings suggest to approach technologies as a form of social experiment
(Rottenburg, 2009). In this context we follow Brian Wynne’s suggestion to conceptualize
technologies as an experiment that deviates substantially form natural science forms of
experiments: “Whereas experiments are supposed to test stated hypotheses, in the case of
technology, the ‘hypotheses’ being ‘tested’ are not even stated, nor even recognized as
such.” (Wynne, 1988, 158).
99
Local Arenas of Power Sharing
1. Projekttitel: Local Arenas of Power Sharing
2. Projektstandort: Berlin (SWP) und Hamburg (GIGA)
3. Zielländer: Burundi und Liberia (Feldforschung), sowie Kenia und DR Kongo (desk
studies)
4. Projektbeginn (zweite Phase): Januar 2013
5. Mitarbeiter/innen:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Mehler, Projektleiter, seit Januar 2011 im Projekt, zwei Kinder, Teilnahme
an SPP 1448 Workshop zu „Comparative African Studies, Hamburg, Februar 2013
Dr. Denis Tull, Projektleiter, seit Januar 2011 im Projekt, (Ist seit Februar 2013 bei SWP
beurlaubt füreine vorübergehende Tätigkeit bei der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Kamerun; eine
Teilnahme an SPPAktivitäten war daher nicht möglich).
Franzisca Zanker, Junior Researcher, seit Januar 2011 im Projekt, Forschungsaufenthalt in
Liberia 08/09 2013 und 01/02 2014; Teilnahme am SPP 1448 Junior Researcher Workshop
"Gender and Beyond" in Laubach Januar 2013; Organisation und Teilnahme am SPP 1448
Workshop zu „Comparative African Studies, Hamburg, Februar 2013; SPP Treffen April 2013
Berlin; Teilnahme an der ECAS Lissabon, Juni 2013
Claudia Simons, Junior Researcher, seit Januar 2011 im Projekt, Forschungsaufenthalt
Burundi 12/2013-02/2014; Organisation und Teilnahme am SPP 1448 Junior Researcher
Workshop "Gender and Beyond" in Laubach Januar 2013; SPP Treffen April 2013 Berlin;
Teilnahme an der ECAS Lissabon, Juni 2013 6. formale Probleme bei der Umsetzung des
Projektes. n.a.
Inhaltlich:
1. Untersuchungsgegenstand und Fragestellung
Um unsere Forschung aus der ersten Projektphase (2011/2012) zu erweitern und zu
vertiefen, haben wir uns in der derzeitigen Phase der Frage gewidmet, welche
Adaptationsprozesse von nationalen Reformen auf der lokalen Ebene stattfinden und welche
Effekte die nationalen Reformen und ihre lokale Adaptation auf lokalen Frieden haben.
Wir konzentrieren uns dabei auf zwei Reformen: Polizeireform sowie Dezentralisierung und
insbesondere das Zusammenspiel beider Reformen. Dabei liegt unser Fokus sowohl auf
dem Reformprozess als solchem, als auch auf der Effektivität der reformierten Institutionen.
Wir analysieren die Reformen dabei
100
in drei Schritten. Erstens stellen wir die Frage, welches Reformziel de jure und de facto auf
der nationalen Ebene formuliert wurde. Dabei analysieren wir die unterschiedlichen
(internationalen
sowie
nationalen)
beteiligten
Akteure
und
ihre
Interessen
sowie
Verständnisse von Sicherheit und Staatlichkeit. Wir berücksichtigen dabei die historischen,
strukturellen und kulturellen Bedingungen der Reform sowie die Möglichkeiten oder
Ausschlüsse, die sich aus der Reform für eventuelle lokale Anpassungsprozesse ergeben
(path dependency). Zweitens untersuchen wir auf der Mikro-Ebene, Verlauf und Ergebnisse
der Reform, d.h. was mit der Reform in den lokalen Arenen "passiert". Dabei betrachten wir
die lokalen Akteure und ihre Entscheidungen. Wir analysieren Akteurstransformationen und
Veränderungen in der lokalen Machtstruktur und gehen der Frage nach, wer wie mit
welchem Ziel und welchen Mitteln die nationale Reform lokal adaptiert, d.h verändert und
anpasst. Drittens fragen wir nach den (intendierten und nicht intendierten) Effekten des
Adaptationsprozesses auf der lokalen Ebene und widmen uns damit der dem Projekt seit der
ersten
Phase
übergeordneten
Frage,
ob
und
unter
welchen
Bedingungen
Machtteilungsabkommen und die daraus folgenden Reformen zu Frieden in den
Hauptkriegsschauplätzen außerhalb des nationalen Zentrums beitragen.
2. Verwendete analytische Konzepte und methodische Ansätze
Wir analysieren konzeptionell, wie standardisierte Reformen (Polizei, Dezentralisierung) im
Prozess ihrer Implementierung auf der lokalen Ebene übersetzt und adaptiert werden. Dabei
verstehen wir institutionelle Reform als Prozess und das Ergebnis des Prozesses als Formen
von „Hybridität“. Die Besonderheit unseres Ansatzes liegt darin, dass wir uns nicht
ausschließlich auf die Hybridisierung 2 internationaler ("liberaler") und lokaler Normen
konzentrieren, also nicht wie in großen Teilen der anglophonen peacebuilding Literatur von
einer simplen Binarität („lokal“ versus „liberal“) ausgehen. Stattdessen arbeiten wir
akteurszentriert und betrachten Hybridisierungsprozesse als ein komplexes
Zusammenspiel
unterschiedlicher
Rationalitäten
(machtpolitisch,
bürokratisch,
technokratisch, kulturell, historische path dependency...) der verschiedenen Akteure auf den
unterschiedlichen Ebenen
(international, national, lokal).
3. Empirische Arbeit
Während der Feldforschungsaufenthalte in Liberia (Franzisca Zanker, August/September
2013; Januar/Februar 2014; Forschung in Ganta, Gbarnga und Monrovia) und Burundi
(Claudia Simons, Dezember/2013-Februar/2014; Forschung in Gitega, Bubanza und
Bujumbura) bildeten sowohl semistrukturierte als auch fokussierte Interviews sowie
Fokusgruppen-Diskussionen, neben der Analyse von Primärquellen und in begrenztem
101
Maße teilnehmender Beobachtung den Fokus des methodischen Vorgehens. Insgesamt
wurden 163 Interviews mit Vertreter/innen der Polizei und Administration, internationalen
Organisationen, Zivilgesellschaft, Medien sowie "traditionellen" Autoritäten geführt. Es
wurden insgesamt 18 Fokusgruppen durchgeführt, jeweils drei in den sechs untersuchten
Lokalitäten. Darüber hinaus nahm Franzisca Zanker an mehreren relevanten Konferenzen
und Treffen teil sowie an einem internen „Security Sector Retreat“ der UN-Mission in Liberia
(September 2013) und an einem Workshop der Governance Commission und liberianischer
Zivilgesellschaft zu den Dezentralisierungsplänen (Januar 2014). Claudia Simons begleitete
mehrere Tage die Etablierung eines "Comité Mixte de Sécurité" in Makamba/Burundi und
eine Sitzung des "Comité Mixte de Sécurité" in Bubanza/Burundi. Während ihres
Aufenthaltes in Bujumbura beobachtete sie das Verhalten der Polizei während verschiedener
Demonstrationen der politischen Opposition.
4. Vorläufige Ergebnisse und Schlüsse
Da wir die Feldforschungsphase gerade erst beendet haben, sind die folgenden
Überlegungen notwendigerweise sehr vorläufig.
1.) Die Untersuchung der "Community Police" in Liberia zeigt deutlich, dass verschiedenste
Akteure auf den unterschiedlichen Ebenen weit auseinander liegende Vorstellungen
haben: sowohl bezüglich der lokalen Umsetzung einer Reform als auch bezüglich ihrer
Wahrnehmungen und Definitionen der Reformkonzepte selbst. Verantwortlich dafür ist
die Tatsache, dass die Reform-initiierenden Dokumente (Friedensabkommen, Gesetze,
Policy Paper, Sitzungsprotokolle) dermaßen vage gehalten werden, dass häufig sich
gegenseitig ausschließende Interpretationen immer noch denkbar sind. Die
institutionelle Reform bildet damit einen Prozess ohne eindeutigen Ausgangs- bzw.
Referenzpunkt (im Sinne eines klar abgesteckten blue-prints oder Schemas). Insofern muss
auch das Konzept von Hybridität neu überdacht werden.
2.) Adaptations- und Hybridisierungsprozesse laufen zyklisch und in unterschiedliche
Richtungen ab. Der Fall der lokalen "Comité (mixtes) de Sécurité" in Burundi zeigt sehr
deutlich, dass es sich nicht um ein Modell "von außen" handelt, welches erst "national" und
dann "lokal" adaptiert wurde. Vielmehr bilden lokale Institutionen (die zum Teil ursprünglich
zentralstaatlich eingerichtet wurden) z.B. die Basis für internationale Programme, welche
dann in nationale Reformen umgesetzt werden. Während dieses Prozesses kommt es zu
Veränderungen/Anpassungen von bestimmten normativ aufgeladenen Kernelementen an die
Machtinteressen der politischen (Partei)Elite. So wird zum Beispiel die Idee, dass spezifische
Posten der Administration, Justiz, Polizei und Zivilgesellschaft an den Sicherheitskomitees
102
beteiligt sein sollen ("Partizipation") von der Regierung aufgenommen. Administration, Justiz
und Polizei sind aber zunehmend von der Regierungspartei durchsetzt und aus der
Zivilgesellschaft werden ungefährliche/parteinahe Personen für die Komitees ausgewählt.
Die Idee, dass die Komitees ein Verbindungsglied zwischen den unterschiedlichen
Bereichen bilden sollen, um Zugang zu Dienstleistungen zu verbessern ("Bürgernähe"), wird
ebenfalls aufgenommen, allerdings mit dem Ergebnis, dass die Komitees vor allem der
besseren Kontrolle der Bevölkerung dienen (durch verbesserten Informationsfluss,
Teilnahme von Parteispitzeln an den Sitzungen etc.). Das hybride (und vorläufige) Ergebnis
sind Institutionen, die zwar Legitimität dadurch erhalten, dass sie international initiiert und
finanziert werden; gleichzeitig aber Normen brechen, die von internationalen 3 Akteuren als
grundlegend betrachtet werden. Eine Folge ist, dass diese Institutionen letztlich zum großen
Teil den Machtinteressen der Regierungsparteikader dienen.
3.) Durch eine Vielzahl von sich untereinander oft nicht koordinierenden Akteuren
(internationale Organisationen, bilaterale Kooperationen, Ministerien, Zivilgesellschaft...) wird
ein Überangebot an überlappenden Strukturen und Institutionen mit zum Teil ähnlichen
Aufgabenstellungen geschaffen. Diese bilden durch vage Aufgabenstellungen und unklare
Abgrenzungen zu anderen Institutionen enorme Interpretationsspielräume. Eine Frage, der
wir weiterhin nachgehen, ist, ob diese Unbestimmtheit lediglich ein Nebenprodukt parallel
verlaufender Anpassungsprozesse ist und/oder von unterschiedlichen Akteuren durchaus
gewollt ist, da dadurch die jeweils eigenen Interessen (z.B. Machterhalt, erfolgreiche
Umsetzung bilateraler Projekte (mit messbaren Ergebnissen, Förderung durch externe
Geber...) umgesetzt werden können. Damit einher geht eine ähnlich unklare Definition von
Sicherheit. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass Sicherheit z.B. in Burundi von unterschiedlichen
Akteuren sehr weit gefasst wird (in der nationalen Sicherheitsstrategie und offiziellen
Dokumenten gilt beispielsweise Alkohol als Sicherheitsrisiko ebenso wie öffentliche
Filmvorführungen, Homosexualität und Ehebruch), bleibt offen, welche Akteure in
welchen Situationen Sicherheit gefährden oder gewähren. Angepasst an die eigenen
Interessen unterschiedlicher Akteure werden also nicht nur die Institutionen als solche,
sondern auch die ihnen zugrunde liegenden Sicherheitsdefinitionen. Das Ergebnis kann
mitunter eine umfassendere Befriedung sein (durch eine Verlagerung des Fokus - wie im
Human Security Ansatz erkennbar - auf individuelle Wahrnehmungen von Sicherheit in der
Bevölkerung). Eine dermaßen breite Sicherheitsdefinition kann aber auch zur Grundlage
eines willkürlichen Polizeistaates werden, in der all diejenigen zum Sicherheitsrisiko erklärt
werden, die die Macht/Interessen bestimmter Akteure gefährden.
Vernetzung:
103
1. Gegenstandsbezogene, regionale, theoretische und methodische Nähe bzw. Kontraste zu
anderen Teilprojekten
Regional arbeitet das Projekt in seiner zweiten Phase nur in einem Land, das auch von
anderen SPPProjekten berührt wird (Kenia: „Translating urban infrastructures“). Inhaltliche
Überschneidungen ergeben sich vor allem mit „Policing Africa“ (Schlichte et al.) und
„Changing Stateness“ (Engel et al.). Wie andere Projekte, die im Cluster „Space“
kooperieren, setzt sich unser Projekt intensiv mit räumlichen Dimensionen der Projektion
staatlicher Herrschaft auseinander. Allerdings liegt unser Fokus im Unterschied zu allen
anderen SPP-Projekten auf der lokalen Adaption nationaler Politiken in friedensbildender
Absicht (Power-sharing und darauf folgende institutionelle Reformen).
2. Kooperationen und Austausch im SPP.
Das ‚Local Arenas‘-Projekt hat in der zweiten Projektphase eigene Initiativen zur Vernetzung
innerhalb des SPP 1448 unternommen. Dazu zählt vor allem die Initiierung und
Durchführung eines Workshops zu „Comparative African Studies“ in Hamburg am 3.3.2013
(Teilnehmende in alphabetischer Reihenfolge: Andrea Behrends, Thomas Bierschenk,
Sebastian Elischer, Christoph Haferburg, Lena Heinze, Laurence Marfaing, Frank Mattheis,
Andreas Mehler, Katharina Newbery, Norman Schräpel, Michael Stasik, Johannes Vüllers,
Julia Willers, Franzisca Zanker). Ein Konferenzbericht wurde im Africa Spectrum
veröffentlicht (Franzisca Zanker/Katharina Newbery: Comparison Re-invented: Adaptation of
Universal Methods to African Studies, Africa Spectrum, 48 (2013) 2, 107-115. Ferner
organisierte Franzisca Zanker den „Liberia Day“ am 6.12.2013 in Hamburg mit Teilnehmern
u.a. vom MPI in Halle und der Universität Bayreuth. Claudia Simons organisierte den SPP
1448 Junior Researcher Workshop "Gender and Beyond" in Laubach im Januar 2013.
Zusammen mit Kathrin Heitz (Projekt „ African State Boundaries“) ist Franzisca Zanker auch
in der Planung und Organisation eines weiteren SPP 1448 Junior Researcher Workshops zu
„Creativity and Adaptation“ beteiligt, der in der zweiten Jahreshälfte 2014 stattfinden soll.
Fortsetzungsantrag:
Der Fortsetzungsantrag wird gestellt, um die reichhaltigen empirischen Ergebnisse der
ersten und zweiten Phase in geeigneter Form auszuwerten und die Kernanliegen des SPP
nutzbar zu machen, 4 insbesondere um einen deutlichen Mehrwert in der akademischen
Debatte sowohl im Hinblick auf Hybridität/Adaption also auch spatiality zu erbringen. Hierbei
planen wir einen Fortsetzungsantrag mit reduziertem Personalbestand (Leitung Andreas
Mehler, Projektmitarbeiterin Franzisca Zanker). Denis Tull (SWP) ist weiterhin an seinem
Heimatinstitut beurlaubt und kann sich als Vertreter der FES in Kamerun nur bedingt der
104
Projektarbeit widmen, Claudia Simons (SWP) hat weitere berufliche Pläne. Beide werden
aber noch Projektergebnisse veröffentlichen und über den 31.12.2014 hinaus das Projekt
intellektuell begleiten. Einige Fragestellungen sind bis zum Ende der Laufzeit der zweiten
Phase noch nicht abschließend zu beantworten, das gilt einmal im Hinblick auf anstehende
Ereignisse
in
den
Projektländern
(insbesondere
der
weitere
Verlauf
der
Dezentralisierungsprojekte in Liberia und Kenia sowie der Abzug von UN Truppen aus
Liberia; aus der Ferne zu verfolgen), das gilt aber insbesondere auch für die
theoretischkonzeptionelle Auseinandersetzung mit zentralen Begriffen der Diskussion im
Bereich Adaption. Wir werden dazu beitragen wollen, den in der Peacebuilding-Diskussion
zentralen Begriff der Hybridität im Lichte der SPP-Diskussion zu Adaption zu verfeinern und
insbesondere Subformen von Hybridität zu bestimmen (theoretisch zu begründen, empirisch
zu unterfüttern). Hier kann eine enge Zusammenarbeit mit anderen SPP Projekten genutzt
werden, um den theoretischen Mehrwert dieser Beschäftigung klarer auszuarbeiten, damit
aber die separate Diskussion in der Friedens- und Konfliktforschung zu beeinflussen
und zu bereichern. Hybridisierungsprozesse sind nach unserer Überzeugung nur als
komplexes Zusammenspiel unterschiedlicher Rationalitäten zu begreifen. Wir planen daher
eine state of the art-Konferenz mit theoretisch und empirisch arbeitenden Fachkollegen,
darunter auch Mitgliedern des SPP („Beyond hybridity: describing and conceptualising postconflict institutional adaptations in an appropriate way“). Im Hinblick auf „spatiality“ wollen wir
die klassische Diskussion zum afrikanischen Staat (Herbst, Kopytoff etc.) mit unseren
Einsichten zu Zentrum-Peripherie-Beziehungen im Zuge von Dezentralisierungsreformen
anreichern und planen auch hierzu einen Workshop und Fachpublikationen.
105
“Policing Africa – Forums of Interaction and the Life
of Files in Uganda”
Reporting Period: March 2013 to May 2014
1. Title: Policing Africa – Forums of Interaction and the Life of Files in Uganda
2. Affiliation: University of Bremen Institute of Intercultural and International Studies Mary-‐Somerville--‐Straße 7 28359 Bremen, Germany
3. Research Areas/Region: Uganda Thematic: police, state, power, bureaucracy, files,
interactions
4. Start of funding period: 01 March 2013
5. Researchers:
Prof Klaus Schlichte, Principle Investigator since March 2011
Field research: February to March 2014
Conferences/Workshops with relation to SPP:
•
SPP Conference, Maputo, October 2012
•
SPP 1448 Thematic Workshop, April 2013, Berlin
•
International Studies Association, Annual Meeting, paper “Max Weber in
Mozambique”, San Francisco, Cal., April 2013 • Conference “Just Police Work.
Ethnographic Research on the Police in Africa”, Department of Anthropology and
African Studies, Johannes--‐Gutenberg, June 2013, University, Mainz, Keynote
address
•
The Image of the State Reconsidered, Workshop “The Strength of Weak States in
Eurasia”, University of Exeter, UK, September 2013, paper--‐giver
•
SPP 1448 Workshop “Technologies of Inscription”, February 2014, Kampala, paper--‐
giver • Presentation Max Weber in Mozambique: Towards a rational world?,
Colloquium “Centre for Area Studies”, Universität Leipzig, June 2014 2
•
Dr Jude Kagoro, Project researcher since June 2013, 3 children
•
Field research: October 2013 to April 2014
•
Conferences/Workshops:
•
Conference “Just Police Work. Ethnographic Research on the Police in Africa”, June
2013, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes--‐Gutenberg
University
•
SPP 1448 Workshop “Technologies of Inscription”, February 2014, Kampala
•
Accepted: International Political Science Association (ISPA), July 2014, Montréal;
paper “For whom Do the Police Work? The Ugandan Police between Militarization
and Everyday Duties” (together with Sarah Biecker), Panel “Good Cops, Bad Cops –
Police Ideal and Police Reality in Transition Societies”
106
Sarah Biecker, PhD student Project researcher since March 2011
Field research: January to March 2014
Conferences/Workshops:
•
SPP 1448 Thematic Workshop, April 2013, Berlin; input: Janet Roitman 2006: The
Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin
•
Workshop “Reconsidering Policing in Africa”, May 2013, African Studies Centre,
Oxford University; Paper “Policing Uganda, policing the World” (paper written together
with Klaus Schlichte)
•
Conference “Just Police Work. Ethnographic Research on the Police in Africa”, June
2013, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes--‐Gutenberg
University, Mainz; paper “Building a Police Post in Kampala”
•
Summer School “The Empirical Study of Domination: On the Political Anthropology of
World Society”, July 2013, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern,
Indemini, Switzerland; paper “Cementing the State, Building a Police Post in
Kampala”; and presentation and discussion PhD project
•
SPP 1448 Summer School “Crisis”, October 2013, Halle; input: The Ugandan police –
disordering order or ordering disorder? • SPP 1448 Gender Workshop, January 2014,
Leipzig; no participation, but input paper on police, research and gender dimensions
•
SPP 1448 Workshop “Technologies of Inscription”, February 2014, Kampala;
presentation “File Example from the Ugandan Police” • SPP 1448 “Narrating
Narratives – Exploring theories of signification and methodological approaches”, April
2014, Köln
•
Accepted: VAD, June 2014, Bayreuth; paper “Present Policing in Uganda”, Panel
“Policing in Africa: Past. Present and Future”
•
Accepted: ISPA, July 2014, Montréal; paper “For whom Do the Police Work? The
Ugandan Police between Militarization and Everyday Duties” (together with Jude
Kagoro), Panel “Good Cops, Bad Cops – Police Ideal and Police Reality in Transition
Societies” 3
Laura Koch, MA student, Student assistant from June 2011 to September 2013
6. Formal Difficulties
Jude Kagoro could not join the project team before June 2013, thus three months later than
the start of the second funding period. This delayed start of employment was due to the fact
that his PhD defense took place only in April 2013 and ensuing procedural problems in the
university’s administration.
7. Project Findings
107
Research Outline and Questions: The main preliminary result of our first phase of research
(2011 to 2013) can be summarized in the thesis that the Ugandan police show simultaneity
of routines and adaptations. We specified this in the formula of “files versus forums” by which
we conceived the life of files as being the highly routinized bureaucratic core of police work.
These routines contrast with the more volatile and changing relationships between citizens
and police officers that are negotiated in forums of daily interactions. Based on these findings
we developed the following research question as guideline for our second research phase
(2013 to 2015): How do dealings with the police shape its routines? Main questions of the
research on “forums of interactions” are:
•
How do the Ugandan society use the Ugandan police?
•
What kind of strategies and power means do people use in interactions with the
police?
•
What kind of conflicts and negotiations take place in these interactions?
•
What kind of patterns or habits result from interactions?
•
How do these interactions affect practical terms as well as with regard to the
institution? Main questions of the research on “the life of files” are:
•
How do cases become files?
•
What is the structure of police files?
•
What are the life circles of the files within the station?
•
What is the function of the files?
•
How do the police use the files and how do clients use the files?
•
What are the police attitudes towards the files?
Theory and Methodology
Rather unusual for political science we still follow the approach of “political ethnography”
(Schatz 2009), which emphasizes long--‐term ethnographic fieldwork as a core method. To
gather practices and discourses that constitute the everyday life of the administrative realm
of policing as well as interactions between the police and Ugandan citizens, we again
decided for a combination of research methods that are mainly borrowed from social
anthropology and constitute our basis of field research. Participant observation, content
analysis, semi--‐structured interviews were the main elements of this research. Theoretically
we have used the Weberian ideal--‐type of bureaucratic rule as an orientation 4 for our work.
Following the methodology of Weber’s interpretive sociology, we used this ideal--‐type as a
foil in order to assess deviations and we combined these insights with the more inductive
construction of what we saw in the field, using a number of other theoretical inputs as of
symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969), the theory of social systems (Luhmann 1993),
108
sociological anthropology (Popitz 1992) or interactionism (Goffman 2005). Due to our
discussions with other projects, we have also recognized the usefulness of theories and
approaches in “Science and Technology Studies” for our work, an alley that we want to
pursue a bit further in the third phase.
Empirical Work
While Jude Kagoro concentrates in his work on “forums on interactions”, Sarah Biecker
works in this phase of the project on “the life of files”. Both conducted several months of
fieldwork in Uganda during this second phase of the project.
JUDE KAGORO
Jude Kagoro conducted fieldwork from November 2013 to April 2014. The field research
activities have mainly been concentrated at two different police stations in Kampala and in
three rural police stations in Kabarole district in Western Uganda. So far, observation at the
police stations and police field operations, in--‐depth interviews, focus group discussions and
informal discussions have been the main techniques used in generating data. Jude Kagoro
has also participated in police field operations such taking suspects to court, drunk driving
operations, organizing traffic on the streets and attended suspects’ parade.
SARAH BIECKER
Sarah Biecker continued her fieldwork in Uganda from January to March 2014 in familiar
settings in Kampala. She conducted participant observation and interviews in a police station
she knows since 2011. Her main work was to collect original documents of inscriptions,
mainly police files. Since files are a sensitive issue, the police strictly limit access. However,
even if it was not possible to get copied duplicates of police files Sarah Biecker managed to
get access and hand--‐copied 15 original police files of different cases and different results.
Moreover, Sarah Biecker traced the life circles of files within the station as well as the ways
of other documents of inscription. She observed and documented how cases become files,
how files and other documents of inscription travel through the administrative realm of the
Ugandan police and how the police and their clients use files and documents for their own
purpose.
Findings and Conclusions
JUDE KAGORO
A four months closer contact and immersion in the everyday activities of the Uganda police
at both police stations and in field operations—coupled with a series of in--‐depth interview—
has revealed that there are different strategies and dynamics involved in the police-109
‐populace interactions. Some interactions are characterized by mutual suspicion, others by
mutual understanding, others by indifference, while some keep shifting from one nature to
another. Following Blumer (1986), the nature of police--‐populace interactions may be
interpreted with the aid of three basic principles. First, the police--‐populace act towards each
other on the basis of the meaning they each ascribe to the other in a specific encounter and
the 5 consciousness of the actors as they interpret their actions. Second, the meaning and
nature of each police--‐populace interaction could also be a social product. Third, the actors
in the police--‐populace interactions assign meaning to their encounters and act based on
assigned meaning of those encounters.
SARAH BIECKER
All lives of files start at the counter of a police station. Here, the police translate an orally told
story into a written form. A story becomes a case, and a case becomes a file. This action is
not only an attempt of “objectivation”, but also an “officialisation” (Bourdieu 2011).
Furthermore, files are products of transformation because files exit only when officers
compile sheets of paper to one document. This document is the reference point for different
actors, including the police, complainants, suspects, attorneys, and the court. Each file
contains a narrative core, which is a story about incidents, actors, and sequences and
always related to individuals. Files produce power because they are “datensetzende Macht”
(Popitz 1992). One of the main results of this research period is the observation that every
file has two stories: the story of the case, and the story of the file itself, which can be read as
the life story of the document and which is again a translation: a translation of police actions
into bureaucratic file language. Against this background, every file is also a product of
significations since the file shows the social life of the police, which is reproduced by it.
According to Vismann we understand files as their own protocols, as written manifestations
of an act (Vismann 2008: 87). Files play a major part in the self--‐referentiality (Luhmann
1993) of the police. However, not only the police use files as power document and for their
own purpose, also police clients can use files for their own interest. Files are not simply
instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies,
knowledge, practices, outcomes, and even the organization themselves (Hull 2012: 254).
References
Blumer, Herbert 1986: Symbolic Interactionism. Perspective and method, Berkeley, Cal.:
University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 2011: Rede und Antwort. 3. Ed.. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
110
Goffman, Erving 2005: Interaction Ritual. Essays in Face to Face Behavior, Chicago: Aldine.
Hull, Matthew 2012: Documents and Bureaucracy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41. 251-‐ 167.
Luhmann, Niklas 1993: Soziale Systeme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Popitz, Heinrich 1992: Phänomene der Macht. 2nd ed.,. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Vismann, Cornelia 2008: Files. Law and Media Technology. Standford California: Stanford
University Press.
Specification of research question
In the coming months we need to discuss extensively how data, findings and insights relate.
We might develop new ideas, but for the time being it looks rather as if we will stick to the set
of questions and the paradigm mentioned above. We plan, however, to use the third phase
for an organized encounter and more systematic exchange between political anthropology
and political science. In the foreground of this encounter, as we imagine it, would be such
issues as the translation of forms of description (bureaucratic against other “lifeworlds”; etc.)
and the possible contribution of political anthropology for a better understanding of
international politics, in Africa and elsewhere.
8. Collaborations (relations, cooperation, exchange)
Two other projects within the SPP became our main partners of exchange, namely
“Translation Global Health Technologies” (Halle) and “Significations of Oil in Niger and Chad”
(Mainz, Halle). With the first project we share a strong interest in the question of technologies
of inscription in general and documentation, and translation in particular. In February 2014
we held a joint workshop with the project in Kampala, Uganda. With the second project we
discovered shared interests in the ethnography of politics. Concomitantly, the anthropology
department in Mainz has ongoing research on police forces in Africa, which led to intensive
exchanges, including joint publications and co--‐supervision of PhD projects across
disciplinary boundaries. Exchanges with other project of the SPP have taken place
continuously on several levels. It was particularly dense at the following occasions: In June
2012, presentation Klaus Schlichte “Do we need a new discipline? The limited globalization
of social sciences”, Lecture Series “Why anthropology today?”, University of Mainz,
organized by Thomas Bierschenk (“Oil and Social Change”), afterwards contribution to edited
volume In May 2013, Oxford, presentation Sarah Biecker: Workshop “Reconsidering Policing
in Africa”, African Studies Centre, Oxford University; Julia Hornberger (“Transnational Crime
Control”) presented in the same panel her work on police in South Africa. In June 2013,
Mainz, presentation Klaus Schlichte, Sarah Biecker, Jude Kagoro: Workshop “Just Police
Work” together with Thomas Bierschenk (“Oil and Social Change”). In February 2014,
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Kampala: Workshop “Technologies of Inscription” with all members of the project
“Translation Global Health Technologies”. In June 2014, Bayreuth, presentation Sarah
Biecker: VAD panel organized by Andreas Mehler (“The Local Area of Power Sharing”)
9. Continuation
We will apply for a third phase. During these last two years we want to write up, publish and
distribute our results and connect them with ongoing debates in at least two different fields
(political sociology, international relations). After having reviewed our data, findings and
insights, we might stretch the list of questions a bit further, but basically we will stick to the
general orientation of our project.
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Translations of the ´Adaptation to Climate Change´
Paradigm in Eastern Africa
Status report, 08.04.2014
Project title: Translations of the ´Adaptation to Climate Change´ Paradigm in Eastern Africa
Participating Institutions: University of Köln, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology
and University of Bayreuth, Institute for Geography, University of Bonn, Institute for
Geography,
Project sites: Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania
Start of the Project: April 2011
Staff: 6 persons
Principal investigators:
1) Prof. Dr. Michael Bollig: project leader: Panel at AAA Chicago Nov. 2013 on “New
Commons” (participants a.o. John Galaty, M. Moritz, T. McCabe, C. Lesorogol); Workshop
on Resilience and Climate Change in East Africa/Baringo District in Cologne Jan. 2014
(participants P.Lane, M. Widgren, D. Verschuren, D. Anderson)
2) Prof. Dr. Martin Doevenspeck: project leader; panel and presentation at the VADConference 2012: “Embattled Spaces - Contested Orders”. Panel on “The Politics of
Climate Change in Africa: Negotiating Responsibilities, Cosmologies and Adaptation”
(together with Detlef Müller-Mahn and Sara de Wit); workshop on „Comparing
Translation Regimes of Adaptation“; presentation on “Politics of Climate Change
Adaptation in Rwanda” at Independent University of Kigali, Gisenyi Campus, Rwanda,
28.02.2014
3) Prof. Dr. Detlef Müller-Mahn: project leader; panel and presentation at the VADConference 2012: “Embattled Spaces - Contested Orders”. Panel on “The Politics of Climate
Change in Africa: Negotiating Responsibilities, Cosmologies and Adaptation” (together with
Martin Doevenspeck and Sara de Wit);; organization of workshop on „Comparing Translation
Regimes of Adaptation“, 4.11.2013; organization of SPP-workshop on “Space and Ordering
in the Area Studies”, Bonn 17.02.2014
Research fellows:
4) MA Julia Willers: research fellow, PhD student; fieldwork: Ethiopia in September and
October 2011 and ongoing (March - October 2012), International Workshop "Intra-regional
learning and technology transfer as a tool for adaptation to climate change in East African
drylands", in Addis Ababa, October, 2011; joint workshop of DIE, UNFCCC, and the
Universities of Duisburg‐Essen, Bonn and Cologne on ‘Researching Adaptation to Climate
Change in Africa - Social science perspectives and methodological challenges’ in Bonn,
January 2012; 4.3.2013 Presentation at the SPP-workshop “Comparison Re-invented:
Adaptation of Universal Methods to African Studies”: “Comparison of processes of adaptation
to climate change in Eastern Africa”, GIGA Hamburg ; 3.10.2013 Presentation at the DGV113
conference “Verortungen”: “Dämme, Magie und Gemeinschaften. Äthiopien und die Debatte
über Anpassung an den Klimawandel”, Mainz.
5) MA Claudia Gebauer: research fellow, PhD student; employed since April 2011; fieldwork:
Bonn UNFCC Conference on climate change; June 2011; Rwanda in September and
October 2011 and ongoing (March - October 2012), joint workshop of DIE, UNFCC, and the
Universities of Duisburg‐Essen, Bonn and Cologne on ‘Researching Adaptation to Climate
Change in Africa - Social science perspectives and methodological challenges’ in Bonn,
January 2012; 27.11.-1.12.2012 ASA Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Presentation Title: “Fluid
Translations of Adaptation to Climate Change in Rwanda: Challenges of a multi-sited
ethnography” ; 5.10.2013: Deutscher Geographentag, Passau Presentation Title in FS 69:
“Klimawandelanpassung als Global Assemblage“ (together with F. Weisser, University of
Bonn); Presentation Title in FS 15: “Ethnographie und Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie als
kombiniertes Forschungsprogramm“; 6.2.2014 Presentation at the BIGSAS Research
Colloquium: “Resettlement as Translation – Materialisations of Adaptation to Climate Change
in Rwanda”.
6) MA Sara de Wit: research fellow, PhD student: fieldwork: Tanzania in November and
December 2011, United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban (COP 17) in
December 2011; joint workshop of DIE, UNFCC, and the Universities of Duisburg‐Essen,
Bonn and Cologne on ‘Researching Adaptation to Climate Change in Africa - Social science
perspectives and methodological challenges’ in Bonn, January 2012; Participation in the
conference ICARUS III (Initiative on Climate Adaptation Research Understanding through the
Social Sciences in New York, May 2012; Mainz 3.10.2013: Panel organizer and presentation
at German Anthropological Association Biannual Conference (DGV): “Locations:
anthropology in the academy, the workplace and the public sphere”. Presentation title:
“Globale Klimapolitik und Lokale Lebenswelten. Wo verortet sich die Ethnologie in der
Debatte um den Klimawandel?”; Presentation at the workshop “Denaturalizing Adaptation to
Climate Change: Migration, Mobilities and Spaces”, University of Bremen. Artec – Research
Centre for Sustainability Studies. 30.10.-1.11.2013; Presentation Title: “Changing patterns of
rain/ and or power? How an idea of adaptation to climate change travels to a village in
Maasailand, Northern Tanzania”; 3.-5.4.2014 Organization of Junior Workshop “Narrating
Narratives” – exploring theories of signification and methodological approaches, in
cooperation with SPP Oil and Social Change project.
Report on the previous project phase:
During the past project phase fieldwork in all three case studies was concluded. This meant
periods of different length spent in the field during the first part of the reporting time. De Wit
spent several months more in a village adjacent to Simanjiro National Park in northern
Tanzania. During this period she was able to deepen her understanding of local
appropriations and contestations of the Adaptation to Climate Change (ACC) discourse.
Moreover, throughout the fieldwork period epistemic communities were followed, climate
change workshops and expert meetings were attended, and interviews with mediators and
policy makers were conducted.
In Rwanda Gebauer continued expert interviews (ca. 70) in governmental as well as nongovernmental institutions, (which in both Rwanda and Tanzania was more of a challenge
than in Ethiopia). Prominently among the visited institutions feature the Rwanda
Environmental Management Authority (REMA) and the Swedish organization Vi-LIFE that is
involved in and promotes agroforestry projects in Rwanda. Gebauer also did research in the
northwest of the country and conducted interviews with local farmers and documented the
organizational structure of climate change organisations. About 100 interviews were
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conducted at the village level. In 2013 Gebauer focussed on a case study in the Gishwati
area – a site of much governmental intervention to improve adaptation to climatic variability.
Willers carried out another 8 months of fieldwork in Ethiopia. In the two urban research sites
– Addis Ababa and Bahir Dar – she conducted of semi-structured interviews (c. 80) in order
to document governmental and non-governmental approaches to ACC. She also participated
in a number of workshops and conferences, most of them organized by the Environmental
Protection Authority (EPA, Government) or by international actors currently working with the
Ethiopian Government. In a case study on rural efforts of ACC she continued research in a
micro-watershed (Merechit) where the Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Development
implemented (under the umbrella of the GIZ) a Sustainable Land Management Programme
(SLMP). In a survey she reached c. 100 out of 240 households interviewing them on their
ideas about ACC.
The PIs did also spend time in the field, partly to carry out complementary empirical
research, and partly to visit the junior researchers in order to follow the empirical
operationalization of research approaches. The whole team convened in two meetings per
year, presented research findings at several conferences (including the VAD conference
2013 in Cologne) and organized a Priority Program workshop on “Concepts of space and
ordering in the area studies” in February 2014.
In the subsequent part of the report we follow the set of key questions outlined in our
application:
(1) Which factors facilitate and shape the translation of technologies and
significations into local webs of belief and webs of institutions as well as
material infrastructures?
This question addresses the contrast between supposedly “western scientific” (or global)
knowledge and local practices to give meaning to observed phenomena. ACC in this sense
is primarily understood as part of the first-mentioned, whereas the notion of translation refers
to the way how the ACC idea “travels” from the one to the other.
Factors facilitating the translation of ACC differ significantly between the three case studies,
which can (partly) be explained by the countries’ respective varying political and economic
historical trajectories that underpin envisaged pathways to development (see below).
However, also commonalities between the different case studies have been observed.
Namely, the attempts to mainstream climate change with overall development goals
(Rwanda Vision 2020; Tanzania Vision 2025) and economic strategies for ‘green’ growth
(Rwanda “Green Growth and Climate Resilience”; Ethiopia “Climate Resilient Green
Economy”).
Through its experience of genocide and its pivotal role in regional conflicts Rwanda has
attained the status as “donor darling”. The country is viewed as a haven for business and
stability. After the matter of ACC has risen on the national political agenda since 2000, a
number of ambitious mechanisms were introduced to mainstream ACC at different
administrative scales. Similar to the other case studies in East Africa, alternative
explanations for environmental change were primarily identified at the ‘local’ level. These
ranged from generalized references to a global lack of natural resources, to divine
intervention. In Ethiopia, “alternative explanations “ with regard to climate change are of even
greater importance. In contrast to the two urban research contexts (Addis and Bahir Dar), in
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which climate change is often explained with reference to (scientific) models, explanations
and perceptions in the rural context predominantly refer to supernatural powers, to forms of
wrath and punishment by God, or they view it as a consequence of a widespread loss of
moral standards. In Tanzania the emerging narrative about the iconic Maasai as ‘ultimate
victims and perpetrators of climate change’ obscures the highly politicized nature of the
challenges they are confronted with. The translation of ACC to the local level brings
longstanding tensions to the fore that exist between the Maasai (agro)pastoralists and the
Tanzanian government. Whereas the government portrays the pastoralists in the debate both
as victims as well as perpetrators of a changing climate, the Maasai view themselves – and
NGOs representing them - rather as masters of adaptation. The emergent adaptation
discourse has led to a relabeling of earlier attempts and policies (e.g. NAPA 2007) that
promote agriculture, discourage mobility and livestock production. Competing knowledge
claims, pathways of development, access to natural resources, territorial boundaries and
religious convictions lie at the heart of how adaptation to climate change in Northern
Tanzania is played out and translated.
(2) What are the social spaces and time frames within which these translation
processes occur?
While we can trace back the emergence of the ACC paradigm to entanglements with earlier
environmental narratives (soil erosion, desiccation discourses, deforestation and general
narratives concerning the production of ‘Nature’); in all three countries it gradually entered
into policy circles around the 2000s, and shaped political agendas with the drafting of the
NAPAs (long-term adaptation objectives) for the UNFCCC in 2006-2007, and the NAPs are
currently being drafted (short-term adaptation objectives). The contours of the varying social
and political spaces are outlined below.
Rwanda’s capacities in terms of human resources are relatively limited when it comes to
international conventions or meetings on the topic of climate change. The Ministry for Natural
Resources (MINIRENA) for example employs only 35 Rwandans. The REMA does have a
number of fixed staff, however the majority are there on a project basis, thus working under
unsecure conditions and generally “on the move” as they try to find a more permanent
position. All these factors contribute to the fact, that a lot of internationally debated climate
change considerations are translated without much appropriation on the national level,
however they’re always suited to the given Rwandan context. Since c. 2000 ACC is fasttracked as evidenced by a number of laws, visions and programmes. In the Ethiopian case
governmental employees from Regional and District levels have a crucial role for
disseminating and explaining the ACC. These Regional and District level Government
officials are located in strategically important positions when it comes to transferring the
Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) to lower administrative levels. They are in regular
contact with central Government branches and get continuously updated on changes of
objectives and strategies of the Ministries/sectors. The Tanzanian case shows more variety.
Tanzania’s climate change landscape can be characterized by their strong emphasis on a
“multi-sectoral approach” underpinned by the countries’ neoliberal political ideology, in which
the private sector is encouraged to play a prominent role in tackling climate change. Hence,
bilateral donors shape the implementation of mitigation projects, which are channeled
through existing NGOs (like CARE, Jane Goodall Institute, WWF).
116
(3) What are the circumstances that lead to an adaptation, to creative
hybridization, to refusal and to rupture?
All three case studies give evidence to the underlieing hypothesis that ACC cannot be
adequately conceived in terms of a “response” to climatic stimuli. Instead, there exist diverse
practices of translation that the project proposes to name as relabeling, hijacking and
creative hybridization or bricolage.
‘Creative bricolage’ features prominently in the translation of the ACC discourse in all three
cases, although to varying degrees and at different levels, which points to the rather arbitrary
use of knowledge vs power. It is not surprising that the powerful players benefit more from
this paradigm than the ones at the level where the implementation of projects is supposed to
take place (see: resettlement program in Rwanda; construction of the Millennium Dam in
Ethiopia and the allegedly disadvantageous adaptation strategies of pastoralists in the NAPA
of Tanzania). Also a relabeling and hijacking of older existing political issues can be
observed in the three case studies.
In Ethiopia the role of political leadership has been crucial in shaping the climate change
agenda, as late president Meles Zenawi almost took a messianic role in international climate
negotiations and ostensibly presented sub-Saharan Africa vis á vis the industrialized world.
He frequently presented himself as an opinion leader and a speaker of the African states in
international climate negotiations. At regional and local levels, however, the case study
revealed that state-led activities for ACC often were nothing else but conventional projects of
erosion control and sustainable land use management that were simply relabeled as
“adaptation”. In Rwanda the self-image of a resilient nation importantly defines adaptations to
the ACC discourse. Having overcome genocide – despite a lack of international response serves as a powerful narrative in social and political questions and is regularly being referred
to when it comes to negotiations over the involvement of international actors in “home
affairs”. The political need and will to manage the continent’s most densely populated
country, where a large part of the population relies on subsistence farming, leads to an
appropriation of CC considerations for national politics. In order to be able to grasp options
quickly and make use of the “new developmental paradigm”, already existing projects are
often being reinterpreted with reference to climate change. Other projects have been newly
created, such as UNDP and UNEP backed resettlement, quickly put to action after a number
of natural disasters occurred in an area that was to be reforested along lines of future
planning. Also a relabeling of older projects and development paradigms can be observed in
Tanzania.
For the Tanzanian case it was remarkable that along the “translation chain” the ACC
paradigm is wholeheartedly embraced by several actors along its discursive journey until it
reaches the rural village of Terrat, where it is by and large rejected. At the national level, in
the translation process of the ACC the global political economy and general socio-political
conditions are removed from the discussion, making the adaptation paradigm travel under a
seemingly neutral guise. The overall refusal of the discourse among the pastoralists can
partly be explained by the dominance of an ontology in which God (Engai) is responsible for
the climate and the weather, which is not compatible with a secular idea such as climate
change. Moreover, the pastoralists fear that this is yet another political trick by the
government to evict the pastoralists of their land.
(4) Which institutionalisations are the results of translation processes? Which
ones are not?
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A mixture between reshaping and reinforcing the existing institutional setup and new
institutionalizations has occurred in both Rwanda and Ethiopia, while in Tanzania the existing
set up is the focus for channelling ACC.
In Rwanda all administrative levels already had an “Environmental Official” before the advent
of CC. REMA today is the main contact partner for all information and projects related to
ACC. Also, the country hosts a National Implementing Entity, a structure created initially by
the Adaptation Fund board to facilitate adaptation financing (ADAPTATION FUND 2011a;b).
International development and several non-governmental organizations have, for the past
decades, forwarded programs such as prevention of erosion (for example through
agroforestry and terracing) in order to secure local livelihoods. These organizational
structures are used today in order to integrate the population into the adaptation to climate
change paradigm. The Rwandan state takes a strong stand in control and planning, and
NGOs need to be ratified by the respective authorities every year. They need to prove that
what they are pursuing with their programs adheres to national development goals.
Source: C. Gebauer
In Ethiopia the role of the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), which is officially
responsible for climate change issues since 2009, has even been enhanced in June 2013
when it was declared the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Forestry. This institutional
reconfiguration at the national level is an expression of the increased attention the issue is
given in national politics, and an attempt to strengthen Ethiopia´s position in international
climate change negotiations. In a similar way, institutional reconfigurations occurred at subnational levels where the organisational structures of large scale watershed management
were upgraded. The Abay Basin Authority, for example, was established in three different
locations under a Proclamation referring to the river basins of the country, with the objective
to regulate the use of Blue Nile waters and issue permits for water users.
Implementation of climate change issues in Tanzania is undertaken within the context of the
National Environment Policy of 1997 and the Environment Management Act (EMA) and other
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specific legislation developed in this context. Tanzania is mainstreaming climate change with
an already existing institutional set up. At national level, the Division of Environment (DoE) in
the Vice President’s Office is responsible for all climate related activities. DoE is both the
National Climate Change Focal Point (NCCFP) for the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change and Designated National Authority (DNA) for clean development project
activities under the Kyoto Protocol. Furthermore, EMA has facilitated the establishment of
various committees at both national and local levels. At national level, there is an established
National Climate Change Steering Committee (NCCSC) chaired by Permanent Secretary in
the VPO - to provide policy guidance to the NCCFP. There is also a National Climate
Change Technical Committee (NCCTC) chaired by the Director of Environment which is
geared to provide technical advice to the NCCFP.
VPO
(Minister Responsible for Environment)
Division of Environment (DOE)
(Director of Environment)
National Environmental Advisory
Committee (NEAC)
NEMC
(Director General
Regional Secretariats (Regional Environmental Management
Experts)
City Councils
(City Council Env.
Management Officer)
City Env. Management
Committee
Municipal Councils
(Municipal Env.
Management Officer)
Municipal Env.
Management Committee
Wards
ward Env. Management Officer) Ward Env.
Management Committee
Sector Environmental Sections
(Sector Environment Coordinators)
Towns
(Town Council Env.
Management Officer)
Town Council Env.
Management Committee
District Councils
(District Council Env.
Management Officer)
District Council Env.
Management Committee
Ward
(Township/ward Env. Management Officer)
Township/Ward Env. Management Committee
Villages
(Village Env. Management Officer) Village Env
Management Committee
Streets
(Mitaa Env. Management Officer)
Mitaa Env. Management Committee
Sub-village (Kitongoji Env. Management Officer) Kitongoji
Env. Management Committee
Administrative structure of institutions responsible for daptation programs in Tanzania
(5) Are certain epistemic communities or social figurations particularly competent
for translation processes?
Research in all three countries focused on decision makers and experts at different
administrative levels. Officials and policy makers navigating between different geographical
and political fields are what Paul Routledge named the imagineers (i.e. translators).
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Routledge uses this term for key contacts within an actor-network that “contribute to the
durability of interpersonal relations; [execute] mobility through space; [have the chances] to
enrol, mobilize and designate networked tasks for others; and […] deploy important
immutable mobiles […]” (ROUTLEDGE 2008: 214).
Rwanda recently saw a distinct orientation toward Anglophone countries. It is due to these
reasons that the major organizations working with regard to the environment in Rwanda
today are SNV (Netherlands Development Organisation) and SCC (Swedish Co-Operative
Centre; specifically their program of Vi-Agroforestry). With the change of the primary
language from French to English, the group of decision makers changed– and thus also in
positions that deal with ACC. The ‘mid-level’ political actors have a difficult task in translating
ACC. They have little power to set the political agenda while being responsible for what is
happening on even lower administrative levels. In Rwanda, environmental officials in all
districts are being trained by REMA. As part of the training, they were asked to identify
climatic risks to their communities and find approaches to solve them. At the same time, local
administrators are asked to ‘mainstream’ the issue of climate change further down the line.
The district officials take part in centrally organized training sessions. They literally “transport”
the ACC discourse to employees on the sector level, who in turn train the cell staff, who
inform the village representatives.
In Ethiopia, Willers applied a biographical approach to the translators of the ACC paradigm,
which revealed some interesting similarities in the biographies primarily of higher-ranking
officials. She found that many of the interviewed persons in higher positions in government
administration or NGOs had achieved a degree (primarily Master degrees) at European
Universities, mostly in . the Netherlands, Sweden and Russia. With regard to international
actors engaging in the context of climate change adaptation in Ethiopia, especially the Global
Green Growth Institute (GGGI) (originally founded as a Korean NGO and since October 2012
an international organization working on Green Growth especially in developing countries) is
of relevance. The GGGI plays an important role in advising the Ethiopian Government in the
context of the CRGE.
This situation is similar in Tanzania, where de Wit found that the majority of policy makers
and experts have been trained at European universities (e.g. The Netherlands and The UK),
and exclusively have a background in technical studies. This is a testimony to the fact that
climate change is considered to be an issue that needs to be approached by the hardsciences, and as such echo globally constructed discourses and internationally drafted
policies. This may perhaps even explain why the majority of experts held such a negative
view of the Maasai pastoralists, and saw their culture as backwards and rather as an
obstacle
to
adaptation
than
as
a
possible
source
of
resilience.
(6) To what extent can this approach explain creativity? Conversely, what does it
falsify and what are alternative approaches?
In all the three countries practices of ‘relabeling’ and ‘hijacking’ of older political and
environmental concepts were observed. They actively contribute to a reshaping and
modification of meaning of the travelling ACC idea, which in its course along the “translation
chain” from global to local levels loses steadily in its fidelity to the ‘original’ source (i.e.
international discourses). These observed practices of multiple reshaping may, as the
120
observations indicate, be interpreted as expressions of creativity. According to Schumpeter
creativity is the capacity and ability to recombine access to resources, knowledge and power.
The Climate Change Adaptation discourse and practices in Rwanda are doing just that:
generating the ability to create new associations and interconnections to handle existing
matters. Through these creative realignments, a specifically Rwandan discourse on climate
change is being designed. Rwanda’s strong state presence, existing control mechanisms
and the central planning do not only leave room for creativity, they even endorse it when
imaginations of upper planning levels transcend the realities of the people. Redefining the
overall envisaged use of a certain program so that it fits to local needs is one point where this
can be observed.
In Ethiopia translations of ACC involve the relabeling or re-naming of already existing
activities in the environmental context in such a way that they are now presented as activities
that aim at adaptation. This ‘hijacking’ of adaptation often serves other purposes and
political aims, and referring to climate change is used as a justification. The most important
example is the Ethiopian Government´s objective to develop the country´s hydropower
potential in the context of developing a green economy. The GTP (Growth and
Transformation Plan) which was launched in 2010 (for the period 2010/11-2014/15) stresses
for the first time that the industrial and service sectors shall receive more attention in the
development of the country. This is a fundamental change in the country´s development
policy, because previous strategic plans and PRSP-papers had focused on agricultural
development.
A striking observation in Tanzania was the discrepancy that was revealed between on the
one hand the country’s alleged ‘proud’ and world leading REDD+ position during the
international climate change negotiations, and how government officials talked about their
climate change strategy back home on the other. By applying the so-called ‘shadowing’
method at the negotiations, according to the Tanzanian delegates, REDD+ was the way to
‘salvation’ for both mitigation and adaptation. While in Dar es Salaam some informants would
even state that this is a new form of green imperialism. It appears that the room for creativity
is fairly limited at the international level – which can partly be explained by conformism,
reputation and donor dependency. Yet it also evokes the idea that Tanzania creatively
makes use of discourses in order to attract both as much mitigation as well as adaptation
funds as possible through different bilateral and multilateral channels. Further in the
‘translation chain’ more varied creativity and translation practices have been observed.
Cooperation and networking with other projects
A close cooperation within the Priority Program evolved along two main axes. One line of
cooperation was established with the project “Oil and Social Change” (Andrea Behrends,
Thomas Bierschenk) in order to explore the role of technologies and their appropriations in
Africa. The second one evolves out of an interest this project shares with a number of other
projects of the Priority Program with respect to the relevance of space and ordering, which
was discussed in a workshop organized by our project in cooperation with Prof. Ulf Engel.
Publications:
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Weisser, F., Bollig, M., Doevenspeck, M., Müller-Mahn, D. (2013) Translating the 'adaptation
to climate change' paradigm - the politics of a travelling idea in Africa. Geographical Journal,
doi: 10.1111/geoj.12037.
Eguavoen, I., Schulz, K, de Wit, S., Weisser, F., Müller-Mahn, D. (2013) Political dimensions
of climate change adaptation. Conceptual reflections and African examples. ZEF Working
Paper 120. Bonn.
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The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control in
Africa - The Fight against Counterfeit Medication.
A. FORMALIA
1. Projekttitel: The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control in Africa --‐ The Fight
against Counterfeit Medication.
2. Projektstandort: Lehrstuhl für Ethnologie und Kulturanthropologie Fachbereich für
Geschichte und Soziologie Universität Konstanz
3. Zielländer South Africa, Europe
4. Projektbeginn 1 July 2013 (31 December 2013: Parttime); 1 January 2014 (Fulltime) (1st
Cycle: 1 January 2011--‐ 31 December 2012)
5. Mitarbeiter
Julia C. Hornberger
Akademischer Grad: Dr.
Funktion im Projekt: PI
Kinder: one child (born on 1.1.2013)
Im Projekt beschäftigt: 1 January 2011 --‐ 31 December 2012 (Zurich) 1 July 2013
(Konstanz)
Forschungsaufenthalte:
August 2013--‐ November 2013: South Africa 5--‐7 November 2013: Geneva January 2014 -‐ June 2014: South Africa
Konferenzen/Workshops:
a) British Academy Visiting Fellow at the African Studies Centre, Oxford University, UK
(May 2013). Presentations during this time included (i): ‘The Belly of the Police.’
Reconsidering the Police in Africa Workshop. African Studies Centre and St Antony’s
College, Oxford, 17--‐18 May, 2013, and (ii) ‘Policing Private Property.’ South Africa
Discussion Group Weekly Seminar, African Studies Centre, Ox ford, 7 May, 2013.
b) Organiser of the international workshop “Good Copy//Bad Copy” in collaboration with
Professor Cory Hayden (University of Berkeley) and the support of the Wenner Gren
Foundation and the Cluster of Excellence of the University of Konstanz, Bischofsvilla
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University Kon--‐ stanz, 16--‐18 December, 2013. Paper presented at the work shop: ‘On
Fake Goods and Fake Cops: In the Business of Securing the Copy.’
c) Discussant at the SPP workshop ‘Gender Dimensions in the SPP 1448’. 23‐25 January,
Leipzig.
d) Presentation of paper ‘Serialising the Copy’ at the ‘Mapping Science and Technology in
Africa’ Conference, 12‐15 February 2014, WISER, Johannesburg.
6. Formale Probleme bei der Umsetzung des Projektes
Due to some uncertainties regarding the ‘Projektstandort’, the project was only approved in
March 2013. Maternity leave and a temporary fellowship at the University of Oxford further
delayed the starting point of the project to July 2013. For the first half year of the project (until
December 2013) Julia Hornberger has made use of the DFG’s provision to go part--‐time to
accommodate parental responsibilities. This means that at this moment of reporting the
project has only run for six months.
B. INHALTLICH
1. Untersuchungsgegenstand und Fragestellung
This study looks at the development of the global campaign against counterfeit medication,
with a special focus on South Africa. The aim is to explore the technologies being brought to
bear in combating the production, trade and consumption of fake and spurious medication,
and to understand how these technologies - through processes of translation and adaptation
--‐ are shaping and being shaped by the interface between health, law and commerce.
National and international policy advocates who advance an anti-counterfeit medication
agenda and demand increasing crime control efforts assume compatibility and a congruence
of interests across concerns about health, crime and commerce, under the banner of a
looming public health crisis. This study shows, however, that these three issues are far from
being congruent and that each of them (in interaction with the other two) produces its own
ways of telling good medicine from bad medicine. This results in a range of competing and
intersecting techniques for regulating the circulation of medication and the re-ordering of
society in the name of drug security. The study is part of a larger comparative project which,
under the title of The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control in Africa, looks at the
translation of technologies across a range of different crime control regimes which all have
emerged as a response to the increased global mobility of ideas, goods and bodies.
3 2. Verwendete analytische Konzepte und methodische Ansätze
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‘Security’ and ‘the copy’ are the two main analytical concepts used in the research. Security
is understood as manifesting itself in a range of different ways that cover a theoretical
spectrum from power as sovereignty to biopolitical power. A special focus lies on how a
security of blockages can turn into a security of flows, and vice versa. Central to these
transformations are processes of translation and adaptation. The question then is what is at
stake and what is being produced/enabled/foreclosed through these transformations. The
copy’ is a fascinating concept in that it is a literal manifestation of the act of translation. More
classic questions regarding the copy deal with the differentiation between the original and the
copy. If however we consider processes of translation as being fundamental to all kind of
social relations, then the questions shifts towards the distinction between the good and the
bad copy, and who and what is able to mark this distinction. The main methodological
approach is an ethnographic one across a range of sites in and between Africa and Europe.
3. Empirische Arbeit
One of the main research activities during the first six months of the project phase was
participant observation at a pharmaceutical conference, which took place in Geneva. At this
conference questions of serialisation and other technological efforts to secure medications
were discussed. This also allowed the researcher to interview a range of key figures
responsible for the introduction of technological innovations (ranging from stickers, to
holograms, to the track and trace technology to scan the serial numbers of medication at the
various points in the supply chain). During her fieldwork in Johannesburg, South Africa, Julia
Hornberger continued her participant research with the Commercial Crime Unit of the South
African Police Service (SAPS). This unit is responsible for the policing of counterfeit goods in
Johannesburg. Their main focus is on media piracy, counterfeit clothes and other branded
consumer goods. Counterfeit medications are still a rather rare occurrence. Police officers of
the unit however use the term counterfeit medication to justify raids of cosmetic goods and
street traders. The fieldwork was also used to follow up on a case study of the selling of legal
and illegal medications at a pharmacy and a local market in a popular migrant area of
Johannesburg. This work is being done with the help of a research assistant. Finally, the
fieldwork period in South Africa has been used to build up contacts with an intellectual
property law firm. These contacts will hopefully lead to access for more close--‐up research
with the firm. Time was also used to build up contacts with people who are involved in hotly
contested procurement processes that decide which pharmaceutical companies get state
contracts to provide state subsidised medication. (Questions of capacity and security are
important criteria in the companies’ bids and the government’s assessment thereof); and to
interview people around a recent scandal regarding the efforts of Big Pharma to undermine
the current IP policy of the South African government.
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4. Ergebnisse und Schlüsse
The leading question/hypothesis regarding recent fieldwork has been how security has
become a cutting edge market advantage in the business of selling medication. The three
research sites on which empirical efforts have concentrated provided a range of insights into
this question, both confirming but also complicating the hypothesis.
First: The success of the local pharmacy, which is owned by an immigrant from Congo, was
about watering down the drug safety and security standards. He often acted as a doctor,
consulting fellow migrants in their vernacular and offering also spiritual advice. He is now
expanding his business back into Congo with South Africa’s drug safety and security
standards as the cutting edge market advantage for his franchise.
Second: The Commercial Crime Unit through their raids of foreign cosmetics on the street
market does not directly confirm the existence of actual counterfeit medication, but by
association creates uncertainty around products which are from Africa or Asia, which are
about the body, and which are copies --‐ legal or illegal. This has the potential to also taint
legal generics in general, and confirms people’s reliance on well--‐ known brand products.
Meanwhile the policing of actual counterfeit medication, which often in fact involves famous
brand products, happens in total secrecy and mainly through private security.
Third: The global trend towards serialisation of medical packages and the introduction of
track and trace technology leads to a restructuring of pharmaceutical profits, and profitability.
Firstly, it is small companies that struggle to introduce the new standards and might lose out
because of it. Interestingly, however, companies that can afford to do so are hesitant to use
the argument of security as a direct marketing advantage. It excessively evokes its very
opposite, meaning they prefer to have their customers not think about security with regard to
their products at all. Instead, however, they see the economic potential of serialisation and
track and trace technology in that it allows them to build up a direct relationship of loyalty with
their customer. For example, customers can verify the serial number through a cell phone
call and in return can be reminded of their doses or receive other kinds of health advice.
Together these three case studies show that only through ongoing processes of translation
and adaptation does a crime-centred idea of security become meaningful in the world of
health and market, and able to accrue both ethical and economic value. The value of security
does not lie with a faithful translation of security into the context of health and pharmaceutical
markets. Instead it lies with re--‐scripting security as a) security embedded in sociality, or b)
security carried out in secrecy, or c) security by association rather than as nominal property,
or d) security as customer loyalty
5. Präzisierung der ursprünglichen Fragestellung
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The overall question of the research will remain intact: How the fight against counterfeit
medication is bringing security issues to bear on the trade and consumption of medicines
and more generally on the field of (global) health. More specifically, the reformulation of
security and market issues under the new paradigm of drug security has received adequate
attention during recent and previous fieldwork. What remains to be researched is the
reconfiguration of health under the same paradigm and at the interface with security and
market.
C. VERNETZUNG
5 1. Gegenstandsbezogene, regionale, theoretische und methodische Nähen bzw. Kontraste
zu anderen Teilprojekten
a) There have been and continue to be strong links of this project with the SPP--‐project by
Professor Thomas Kirsch “The Anthropology of Crime Control in Africa” and the two sub-‐projects by a) Michael Bürge on ‘The War on Drugs in Sierra Leone” and by b) Anna Hüncke
on ‘The Fight against Human Trafficking in South Africa’. This involves supervisory activities;
exchange over shared concepts such as security, policing, the circulation of goods, ideas
and bodies, the state etc.; and methodological concerns with each of the three projects
facing particular challenges in accessing either secretive institutions such as the police, or
illicit worlds.
b) The close relationship with the SPP project on ‘Translating Global Health Technologies’
has been continued, especially through the participation of Prof Richard Rottenburg and Dr.
Sung‐Joon Park in the workshop organised by Julia Hornberger on “Good Copy//Bad Copy”.
Here the concept of ‘the (medical) copy’ proved to be very productive in working out the
connections between the two projects. These connections and intersections were further built
on through exchanges which took place at the conference on “Mapping Science and
Technologies in Africa”, which took place in Johannesburg, and in which members of both
projects were involved in organising.
c) Exchange with Sarah Biecker (SPP‐project: 'Policing Africa') about practices of everyday
policing took place during the ‘Reconsidering the Police in Africa’ Workshop organised by the
African Studies Centre and St Antony’s College of the University of Oxford. d) The SPP
workshop ‘Gender Dimensions in the SPP 1448’. 23‐25 January, Leipzig, to which Julia
Hornberger had been invited not only to present her own work but to be a discussant,
enabled a intense engagement with most of the SPP projects.
2. Kooperationen
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a) with Professor Cori Hayden (Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley) in organising and running the workshop on Good Copy//Bad Copy. The workshop
was made possible through a grant from the Wenner‐Gren Foundation and the Cluster of
Excellence of the University of Konstanz, and with the support of Prof. Thomas Kirsch and
the Lehrstuhl für Ethnologie und Kulturanthropologie. The people who attended the workshop
included some of the leading figures in the Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals such as Carlo
Caduff (Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, Kings College, London);
Maurice Cassier (EHESS/CNRS, Paris); Stefan Ecks (Department of Anthropology,
University of Edinburgh); Jean‐Paul Gaudillière (EHESS/CNRS); Emilia Sanabria
(Anthropology, University of Lyons, France); Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Department of
Anthropology, University of Chicago, US); Richard Rottenburg (Department of Anthropology,
University of Halle, Germany); Sung‐Joon Park (Department of Anthropology, University of
Halle, Germany); Kris Peterson (Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine, US); Mathieu Quet
(Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation Société, France); Anita Hardon (Department of
Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands);
b) close cooperation exists with various people and departments at the University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, especially around the Johannesburg Workshop
in Theory and Criticism (JWTC). This workshop has been convened every year since 2009
by Julia Hornberger, Kelly Gillespie and Achille Mbembe (WISER). Julia Hornberger is also a
close collaborator of the African Centre Migration and Society at Wits (ACMS), where she
has been involved in ongoing supervisory activity.
3. Austausch n/a
4. Fortsetzungsantrag The researcher might apply for an extension depending on the
decision of the DFG to grant her the transferral of her research money to a new position at
the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. The
extension would serve to write up the findings and prepare them for publication.
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