The Development State: Aid, Culture, and Civil Society in Tanzania by Maia Green

ISBN: 9781847011084

Publisher: James Currey, 2014

Paperback, 217 pages

A timely, ethnographically informed account of the "development state" of Tanzania, showing how development practice and culture have become integrated into everyday life, politically, socially and economically.

How has development affected the practices of the state in Africa? How has the development state become the basis of social organisation? How do Tanzanians position themselves to obtain aid money to effect change in their personal lives?
Financial aid flows have entrenched an economy of intervention in which the main beneficiaries are those who can claim to undertake development activities. Even for those not formally engaged in the development sector, its discourses influence everyday discussion about class and inequality, poverty and wealth, modernity and tradition. With Tanzania as the country focus, the author shows how the practices of development have infiltrated not only the state at large but many aspects of people's everyday lives