The Development Marketplace: Explaining People’s Engagement with and Rejection of Interventions

How do recipients of developmental interventions navigate the ‘development marketplace’ as ‘consumers’?

Because of the literature’s predominant focus on studying single development projects, tracing the work of NGOs, and following the political economy of single commodities, there is a great gap concerning the complex context in which multiple interventions compete for participants.

On the other end, people find themselves immersed in, what I call, the development marketplace being active consumers, selecting which projects to participate in, drop-out from or reject. Since the 2016 Peace Agreement, Colombia became a major recipient of development assistance.

Chocó, the country’s poorest region and one of the worst affected by the country’s conflict, has been a focus area for development assistance with multiple projects ongoing.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork to be carried out in Utría National Park, Chocó, I will study the ways people navigate the development marketplace when presented with various development intervention options.

The project advances my theorisation of development as a ‘gift’ to study the marketplace as a space where social relations and obligations are actively produced during development interventions.

Such approach emphasises people’s experience and agency, and helps explain why they join-in, reject or drop out, and how they are conceptualised by the development interventions they are asked to partake.