spotting local power in aid interventions: preliminary thoughts

talesfromthehood is a perennial favorite on my google reader. it tends to be a smart, funny, and no nonsense commentary on aid and development (and the author is a co-blogger on the incomparable stuff expat aid workers like). i especially enjoyed the recent critique of three cups of tea's popularity.

i found today's post, "power", engaging as well, although i question the connection between the points made in the intro and the example chosen to illustrate them (although, to be fair, the intro and concluding bits seemed to be a kind of analytical dressing for the sake of drawing a lesson from the very very funny anecdote). TFTH says,

"Understanding who has power in a community is vital to doing good aid. And yet we very frequently get it wrong. We miss the cues. Local power often hides in plain sight in the eyes of outsiders."

right. i've been chewing on another post about positionality in development research and my experience in humla, so much more on this later, but for now: yes, blindness to the myriad and overlapping local structures of power is a really fast way to screw up a development intervention. but TFTH's example doesn't really turn out to be about that. his anecdote about an interaction with a "camp leader" in haiti is about an inability to spot locally powerful individuals, something that is only one small part of the manifestation of local power structures...and something that, in my experience, is actually not all that hard figure out. i'm working with much more limited, and possibly very different (community development, as opposed to humanitarian aid) experience, but i would say that local leaders are pretty easy to spot. they're the ones who will dominate group discussions, and the ones who will feel most comfortable approaching local NGO staff and engaging with them seriously and sometimes even contentiously; they speak with authority and are treated with visible respect. i mean, no assumptions about local power and local leaders should be taken without a grain of salt (and significant amounts of open-minded observation). however, it seems to me that identifying local leaders is only the first, and the least challenging, step of mapping the narratives that are made visible and invisible by local power structures, and, most importantly, making visible the invisible ones and incorporating them into planning and implementation.