Development Inequalities | Angola

Two men in professional clothing sitting on a veranda having a discussion.
Three people examining a statue of a soldier sitting on the ground with a gun on his back and a pen and notebook in his hands.
Man at a highway viewpoint overlooking a valley.

In the decade following Angola’s long and brutal civil war, the country struggled not necessarily to “rebuild” but, effectively, to build from scratch both the physical and political infrastructures of a peaceful, independent country. Believing democratization and good governance essential to peace and stability, intergovernmental and international non-governmental organizations rushed to the country to support these efforts. While they often hired local and returning Angolans to implement the projects, “international” staff often led the projects as well as managed the “national” or “local” staff. These classifications—“international,” “national,” “local,” and the like—came with a set of presumptions all staff acted to fulfill and a set of limitations to which they were held.

Suburban street in Angola decorated for independence day with houses behind gates with barbed wire. A man in a truck drives one way down the street as a woman walks the other way carrying something on her head.

Between 2005 and 2015, I completed ethnographic fieldwork in Luanda, Huambo, and Bié Provinces, examining the experiences of in-country development and humanitarian aid professionals in a post-war democratization program. Rather than approaching this research through the typical development “encounter” between agents and intended beneficiaries, my research explored the internal logics of the development industry: the various logics that drive organizations and the experiences of both local and international staff.
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Ultimately, I argue, these institutions replicate and reproduce many of the same global inequalities they seek to combat.

I have shared many of my findings from this research in various academic journals. These articles examine themes such as:

  • Professional distinctions between “local” or “national” and “international” staff
  • The experiences of transnational professionals
  • Interpretative labor and policy execution at the community implementation levels
  • The logics underpinning monitoring and evaluation as a staple in development NGOs’ operations

​These and more articles can be accessed here.

International and local development workers in a conference rooms watching a presentation that's projected as a slideshow on a screen.
Four development workers surround a table and hover over a document they're working on collaboratively. One is holding a marker and writing. There are notebooks on the table filled with their notes.

My book, Implementing Inequality, builds on these themes, focusing on how institutional categories in development organizations formalize unequal privilege within the industry.

​In the book, I examine how common bureaucratic practices such as monitoring and evaluation programs or logframe analysis obscure and frustrate the on-the-ground work of implementation agents (the “implementariat”), rendering them an inferior class of professionals and undermining their efforts. Underestimating the intense relational work of the implementariat, development sabotages itself and must revisit how to assess its work and workers.
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Read more about the book here.