Join our Email List Berghahn Books Logo

berghahn New York · Oxford
Browse All Books
Traveling Models and Practical Norms: The Misadventures of Social Engineering in Africa and Beyond

View Table of Contents


Email Newsletters

Sign up for our email newsletters to get customized updates on new Berghahn publications.

Click here to select your preferences

Traveling Models and Practical Norms

The Misadventures of Social Engineering in Africa and Beyond

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

336 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-80539-852-3 $145.00/£107.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (February 2025)

eISBN 978-1-80539-853-0 eBook Not Yet Published


View CartYour country: - edit Recommend to your LibraryAvailable in GOBI®

Reviews

“This is a very worthwhile book … it brings together a new and very coherent argument around development. The sheer scale of Olivier de Sardan’s ground-level immersion in the issues over five decades lends the book an incomparable rigor and depth.” • David Lewis, London School of Economics

“This is a valuable book by a leading anthropologist of development, statecraft, and bureaucracy in West Africa. It is clearly something of a culmination of a distinguished career, filled with insights gleaned from decades of work.” • Kevin Donovan, The University of Edinburgh

Description

Public policies, development projects, and NGO interventions often have large gaps between the planning and execution. Standardized public policies, especially development ones, ignore the multiple contexts in which they are implemented. Local actors (those targeted by public policies or responsible for implementing them) play a major role in the implementation of planning and execution. Their many strategies for circumventing official directives and protocols follow implicit "practical norms" that are ignored by international experts. This book examines how different modes of governance that deliver services of general interest experience significant gaps between explicit rules and implicit practices, between planned actions and daily routines, in Africa and beyond.

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan is among the founders of LASDEL, Laboratory for Study and Research on Social Dynamics and Local Development, in Niamey. He is also Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His latest publications include Yearning and Refusal: An Ethnography of Female Fertility Management in Niamey, Niger, (2023, Oxford University Press).

Subject: Political and Economic AnthropologyDevelopment Studies
Area: Africa


Contents

Back to Top



Library Recommendation Form

Dear Librarian,

I would like to recommend Traveling Models and Practical Norms The Misadventures of Social Engineering in Africa and Beyond for the library. Please include it in your next purchasing review with my strong recommendation. The RRP is: $145.00

I recommend this title for the following reasons:

BENEFIT FOR THE LIBRARY: This book will be a valuable addition to the library's collection.

REFERENCE: I will refer to this book for my research/teaching work.

STUDENT REFERRAL: I will regularly refer my students to the book to assist their studies.

OWN AFFILIATION: I am an editor/contributor to this book or another book in the Series (where applicable) and/or on the Editorial Board of the Series, of which this volume is part.