Description
The pitfalls and false promises of Africa’s foreign-funded ‘civil society’ boom since the 1990s has been a site of considerable academic endeavour. Foucauldian and Gramscian-inspired work, for example, demonstrated the continued insertion, mediation and, ultimately, co-option of NGOs by foreign and domestic governments in the service of economic and/or foreign policy objectives (e.g. Duffield 2001; Ferguson 1994; 2006; Hearn 2001; Tvedt 1998). More recent work has focused on the precise mechanisms of ‘disciplining dissent’ (Coleman & Tucker 2011) on the part of NGOs as they consolidate their place within the existing neoliberal global order, bringing their constituent subjects into line with key neoliberal tenets (Gabay 2011). This paper builds on the disciplining dissent literature to demonstrate how NGOs both discipline their constituents at the local, or ‘grassroots’, level in Tanzania whilst they themselves are disciplined by corporate and state power within Tanzania’s broader political economy. It does so through the extended examination of a highly sanitized, ‘air conditioned’ consultation meeting between a foreign agriculture firm introducing a contentious bio-fuel project, civil society representatives and local government in Bagamoyo district. It draws on 12 months’ further ethnographic research to contextualize the seemingly sterile meeting within the highly charged and contested political economy of Tanzania. It elucidates how the NGOs present ‘non-represented’ project-affected villagers but also how the corporation used meeting technique to mediate, stem and suppress any potential dissent on the part of civil society in the first instance, reaffirming the politico-economic hierarchies in the room. Thus the villagers affected by the biofuel project were doubly disciplined by both civil society and corporate actors and thus doubly distanced from the political sphere.
