International development and bilateral aid to Kenya in the 1990s

摘要

This paper seeks to analyze a decade of international development in Kenya through the lens of a multi-sited and multi-level ethnographic analysis. It demonstrates the inherently messy and political nature of development as well as the need to analyze the social and cultural contexts in which policies are debated, negotiated, and implemented. An anthropological approach provides insight into the complexity of development policy and the unpredictability of development outcomes which are obscured by research that relies on policy texts and/or eschews empirical fieldwork.