My doctoral research will be carried out within the framework of ERC project AfDevLives (The Afterlives of Development Interventions in Eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique)). Consciously decentering frameworks that conceive of projects in a linear way whose outcomes can be reduced to measurable criteria, AfDevLives seeks to focus on what remains of international development initiatives in order to make visible long-term (unforeseen) outcomes that become accessible to us within situated relations between all involved actors. 

Within that framework my research project centers on the town of Nachingwea in Southern Tanzania. The town has been a place of repeated international development intervention whose traces can be found within present experiences, narratives and material formations. My main case study will focus on theafterlives of a development project funded by the World Bank Group, that was initiated in the late 1970s in order to strengthen the agricultural sector of cashew production in Nachingwea and neighboring districts in the South of Tanzania. By providing processing plants, training, and equipment, the project aimed at increasing the productivity of cashew production and thereby improving the economic situation of rural communities. Even though the aim of increasing the processing capacity of cashews was temporarily achieved, the dramatic decline in cashew production in the 1980s impeded the utilization of the new factoriessoon after their completion, which is why planners do not consider the project a success. In my thesis, I want to consider places of past development initiatives as ever-shifting assemblages (Nail, 2017), constituted by daily practices and rhythms (Ingold, 2011), (public) debates, and material remains (Stoler, 2013) that are connected to the continuous past of (potentially unachieved) “progress”. The research aims at rethinking how to account for this past in its ongoing negotiation that becomes tangible through the lived present and thereby blurs the linearity of static timelines often brought forth by the development sector. The project will have a focus on disparate temporalities and processes of ruination which co-constitute the situated condition of development’s afterlives. By adopting a phenomenological approach (Houston & Ram, 2015) the research will concentrate on embodied experiences, agency and reappropriation. It is within these formations of everyday life that the case of Nachingwea resonates with the main research question brought forth by project AfDevLives: How are the representational and material remains of past development interventions in Eastern Africa experienced, employed, and re-appropriated by local actors over time, and how does such immanence of the (multi-layered) past come to bear on local life-worlds? The study will apply anthropological methods such as participant observation, semi-structured and narrative interviews, as well as visual tools like photo voice in order to bring forth voices of community members who continue to experience and debate the lasting impacts of international aid projects. As Schler and Gez point out: “More research is needed to understand how local imaginaries, initiatives, and criticisms play a role in shaping and employing the legacy of schemes long after they have completed theirformal lifespan” (2018, p. 8). 

Key words: International development, afterlives, temporalities, phenomenology, Tanzania

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