The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Catherine A. Corson to work with Dr. James R. Fairhead at the University of Sussex and with Dr. William M. Adams at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
This post-doctoral research compares the U.S. Agency for International Development's environmental agenda with that of the British Department for International Development. Specifically, it analyzes how the different political, bureaucratic and historically-grounded ideological approaches of these agencies have produced different strategies to integrate environment into the development agenda. It then explores how the agencies' positions within their respective governments, their relationships with environmental groups and their historical relationships with sub-Saharan Africa have produced dramatically different discourses and associated material practices around the production of an "environmentally sustainable development" agenda. The research addresses a lacuna in political ecology and post-development literature and contributes to an expanding field around the ethnography of development institutions. In so doing, it moves beyond traditional development critiques of project outcomes, to focus on the complex policy process. It challenges many prevailing notions of bureaucracies by arguing that understanding the bureaucracy necessitates "unbounding" it to reveal how ideas develop, travel and articulate with bureaucratic practice at specific points in time and space in and among the "all-powerful development institutions." In this way, it shows the limits and fragilities within the bureaucratic "black box" and reveals sites of contestation, weakness and openings for maneuver. In exploring the mutual constitution of American and British foreign aid, this research will contribute to a greater understanding of the transnational linkages that produce the global development and conservation agenda. Ultimately, the research aims to provide a politically-enabling understanding of how development ideas are created and translated throughout the policy process, what influences this trajectory and what choices and constraints policy-makers face both in the United States and Britain.
