Engaging T.D. Harper-Shipman’s Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa : An Introduction

In the specific contexts of Anglo-American settler-colonialism, Robert Nichols writes that dispossession “refer[s] to a process in which new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. In effect, the dispossessed come to ‘have’ something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another” (2020: 8). Dispossession therefore combines in one moment the transforming of nonproprietary into proprietary relations and the immediate transfer of control of the newly generated property. Those who are thereby dispossessed “are figured as ‘original owners’ but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself” (Nichols, 2020: 8). Nichols explains that

Recursion is not . . . simply tautology. Rather than a completely closed circuit, in which one part of a procedure refers directly back to its starting point, recursive procedures loop back upon themselves . . . such that each iteration is not only different from the last but builds or augments its original postulate. (2020: 9)

In sum, then, dispossession “exhibit[s] a ‘recursive’ structure because it produces what it presupposes . . . theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property-generating theft” (Nichols, 2020: 9).

T.D. Harper-Shipman’s incisive new book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019), makes several significant contributions. At their center is her account of how the old—in this case, models of aid giving in Africa—has been made new, through the paradigm of “ownership of development,” and the attendant political consequences. In what she describes in this symposium as “a resuscitated neoliberal development in a Frankenstein form,” the ownership paradigm co-opts the language of partnership, country ownership, local knowledge, and stakeholder participation to reanimate the spirit of competition, private profit, measurable results, hierarchies of knowledge, and co-optation. At work in the transformation is the further disemboweling of the linguistic coherence of the political aspiration of African national self-determination.

Nichols’s account of recursive dispossession is evident here. While “ownership” has been elicited by unrelenting criticisms of earlier aid models, what it means to “own” is not the intended or desired relationship sought. It is instead a disaggregated one: rather than referring to wielding the capacities meaningfully to exclude or determine use, or to control global economic institutions that generate the paradigms that shape policy agendas, “ownership of development” in Africa primarily ascribes responsibility to governments and select civil society organizations for policy implementation and culpability for their failures. While governments must generate proposals, demonstrating how they will hold themselves accountable for their carrying out, these require approval from Western donor experts. This “new” form is a contemporary reformulation of the same. As Harper-Shipman puts it, as blame for climate catastrophe, social upheaval, and economic disintegration and their consequences are placed “at the feet of African elites and politicians,” there is no room in the ownership paradigm for grappling with “the historical inequities that have framed the ways in which the African continent was brought into the global economic system” (Harper-Shipman, this forum).

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò begins the symposium, contextualizing his comments and Harper-Shipman’s work in over a decade’s debate in Africa over the aid regime’s role in the larger project of political independence. He particularly emphasizes the value of Harper-Shipman’s choice of the two radically different cases, of Burkina Faso and Kenya, to demonstrate that “neither the state institutions in the two countries nor their civil society components have been able to lay claim to the requisite knowledge base—theories, databases, technical know-how—to talk plausibly of owning programs and projects” (Táíwò, in this forum). Táíwò also applauds Harper-Shipman’s choice of the health sector as her focus, given that good health or the welfare of individuals and of the citizenry should be considered integral to any viable conception of development. As with other domains of life, ill-health and good health are not narrowly biological. Their understanding is fundamentally inflected by local idioms in ways that have unwisely been crowded out. As Harper-Shipman writes,

I do not mean to suggest that things like health, education, and decent housing should no longer be important goals of African societies. However, what constitutes being healthy, having a good education, and living in decent housing should not be the product of another culture’s notions. (2019: 121)

Productively exploring how the discursive hegemony of scientific capitalism that Harper-Shipman illuminates also stymies genuinely country-led and country-specific efforts of self-determination in the Jamaican context, Greg A Graham shows how, as in Burkina Faso and Kenya, neoliberal-infused ownership paradigms engender models of growth that intensify the challenges faced by the most vulnerable in the developing world. Even so, leaders across meaningful political divides in Jamaica have celebrated and embraced taking responsibility as the core of their economic vision. While the idea of responsibility, especially in the postcolony, has greater moral traction than that of ownership, the two in fact intertwine in ways that have undercut anti-imperial and anti-capitalist traditions of conceiving of Jamaican sovereignty. Graham concludes, “In the Jamaican context, the discourse around responsibility and ownership of development is part of the subterfuge through which [the IMF and World Bank] have sought to rejuvenate the practice of business as usual in accordance with the neoliberal paradigm” (Graham, in this forum).

The genealogy of this “business as usual” is explored by Jean Comaroff, who stresses the centrality of linguistic rebranding to the presentation of old as new models. In this instance, would-be African stakeholders have readily mastered the requisite vocabulary, but, she asks, how much of this is empty performance or knowing participation in a charade of partnership for the sake of accessing scare resources? No one seems fooled about where the real power remains. It is still with those who own capital who seek, under the re-glossed cover of humanitarian development, new rounds of more readily rapacious access. At work is the all-too-familiar colonial desire to control, racialize, and extract. Historically and today, there are competing visions of stewardship of economies and the management of national resources. Some of these actively counter “neo-imperial dependency,” whether in “post-development” or “decolonization modes.” As pertinent are other non-African alternative models that are increasingly displacing paternalistic evolutionary capitalist models with those of international security, on the part of the US and Europe, and of direct commerce and infrastructure financing, on the part of China. As “the center of gravity is rapidly moving beyond the old liberal world,” writes Comaroff, Africans “are carefully weighing their options in a new era” (Comaroff, in this forum).

Finally, in Harper-Shipman’s contribution to this symposium, she brings her book’s analysis up to the present by emphasizing the simultaneity in 21st-century Africa of unprecedented economic growth and burgeoning social movements. The latter explicitly confront the dogmatic coupling of prosperous progress with peace. Many, as is also evident in Latin America, demand forms of development that are not premised on radical extractivism of people and of the Earth or ones that are more equitable and sustainable. In so doing, they challenge those who frame themselves as development “partners” and the discursive and ideational limitations of their “ownership paradigm.”

These social movements highlight the dynamics that Harper-Shipman details in contemporary Burkina Faso, where all “facets of development beyond the economic sector have yielded to the insecurity” (Harper-Shipman, this forum). As the country’s GDP grew from US$10.4b in 2015 to US$14.1b in 2018, 2019 was marked by drops in women giving birth with a skilled health professional and by school closures. The numbers of people internally displaced this year (in 2020) were so large that the country could be the “next Syria.” It is clear to Burkinabè citizens that the privileging of macroeconomic structural reforms above everything else has led to the proliferation of violence. So much so that they have linked government and donor-backed pushes for increased mining with “increased armed robberies, drug usage, child labor, and HIV/AIDS.” In response, local actors are seeking ways to circumvent the state and donor community. Among them are groups of armed men who, in the recent past, were partners of their own government. More recently, they have emerged in regions of the country where there are few jobs or educational opportunities and where police or state presence is limited. In what international observers are decrying as terrorism, they are patrolling, managing independent jails, and capturing and punishing criminals. They envision their activities as a movement for self-defense. The discrepancy in these interpretations of the enactment of local agency is impenetrable, argues Harper-Shipman, if one overlooks structural conditions, including the consequences of foreclosed debates over what legitimately constitutes civil society. As Harper-Shipman observes more generally, “under the [ownership of development] paradigm, donors and the global economic system are not deemed responsible for creating the structural obstacles to improving living conditions in many African countries” (Harper-Shipman, in this forum).

Both in this forum and in her book, Harper-Shipman’s analysis then offers a very helpful guide to what social movements of assailed communities face as they challenge leaders who have, in varying degrees, embraced the logic and dictates of 21st-century capitalist development. Her rich ethnographic account mirrors Nichols’s account of structured dispossession. These elites have come to “own” development in their countries through alienating the ability to envision a form of development that would not be self-devouring. Many such leaders have become attached to the results, celebrating them as progress, even as their societies unravel.

A question for those who have rejected this brand of “ownership” as illusory, sinister, or simply neocolonial, is how to engage in a return that is more than a recursive loop. Harper-Shipman offers some guidance in closing:

My analysis of the language and practice of ownership in Burkina Faso and Kenya reveals active attempts to ahistoricize the centuries of exploitation and extortion that the continent has endured. To truly consent to development at this juncture is not merely to look back but also to follow the Sankofa proverb and “go back and get it,” “it” being a more profound sense of social and political change that coalesces around each country’s realities . . . . Moving beyond ownership means moving beyond the language, practice, and promises of neocolonialist development in Africa. Addressing the social needs specific to each African country cannot happen under a universal approach that gives ex ante prescriptions for progress. A decolonized ownership may mean uncertainty, but it offers more opportunities for transformation. (2019: 121–122)