About
177
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Introduction
David Lewis currently works at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). David does research in development studies and social anthropology, and his most recent research project was on local power relations in Bangladesh, with Dr Abul Hossain. He recently published a new Open Access co-edited book 'New Mediums, Better Messages? How Innovations in Translation, Engagement, and Advocacy are Changing International Development' (OUP)
Additional affiliations
September 2006 - September 2009
Position
- Life histories of state/civil society sector boundary crossers
Description
- Three country comparative study - Bangladesh, Philippines and UK - funded by ESRC.
May 1995 - present
European School of Economics
Position
- Professor (Full)
Education
October 1985 - May 1989
October 1979 - June 1982
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Field of study
- Social Anthropology
Publications
Publications (177)
The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. This wide-ranging collect...
The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. This wide-ranging collect...
The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. This wide-ranging collect...
The experience of development, as well as understandings of and responses to it, are uniquely rendered through popular culture generally, and popular music in particular. Music has been a medium of choice through which marginalised populations all over the world convey their (frequently critical) views, while in the Global North music has also long...
The experience of development, as well as understandings of and responses to it, are uniquely rendered via popular culture generally, and popular music in particular. Music has been a medium of choice through which marginalized populations all over the world convey their (frequently critical) views, while in the Global North music has also long pla...
The study of the Bangladesh state continues to be a path less travelled for scholars of South Asia. The articles in this special issue aim to offer fresh perspectives based on recent ethnographic work on a variety of aspects of the state by new young national and international scholars. Overall, there is a pressing need to pay closer attention to t...
This paper reflects on responses to Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee crisis in the weeks that followed the increased numbers of Rohingya refugees who arrived from Myanmar after 24 August 2017. Drawing on literature on the local and international dimensions of humanitarianism, and the analytical lens of performance, it explores narratives of helping in...
During the past decade Bangladesh has shifted from a competitively clientelistic two‐party system towards a dominant‐party democracy. This article analyses how the ruling party has consolidated partisan political control at the local level. Using qualitative field data from 2004 and 2016, and drawing on a post‐structural analysis of the state, it s...
Confusion between the idea of development as purposeful intervention and development as outcome has been addressed by efforts to distinguish ‘intentional’ from ‘immanent’ development, and the distinction between ‘big D’ development as Western post- World War Two modernisation in the Global South, and ‘little d’ as the creation of winners and losers...
Confusion between the idea of development as purposeful intervention and development as outcome has been addressed by efforts to distinguish ‘intentional’ from ‘immanent’ development, and the distinction between ‘big D’ development as Western post- World War Two modernisation in the Global South, and ‘little d’ as the creation of winners and losers...
Akhtar Hameed Khan was a Pakistani official turned community development activist. After initiating the government’s Comilla rural development experiment during the 1960s he went on to found the Orangi Pilot Project, an innovative NGO working in Karachi. An early example of the ‘social entrepreneur’, Khan’s reflexive style also influenced many alte...
As World Development Report 2017 reminded us, understanding how the local power structure works, and how it is perceived, continue to be important themes for mainstream development policy and practice. Power asymmetries contribute to exclusion, inequality and restrict equitable growth. This paper reports on findings from a recent re-study that aime...
Policy-makers are often seen as being out of touch with the communities they serve. But closing the “gap” between policy makers and people is not straightforward. An experimental initiative in Bangladesh known as the “reality check” attempted to influence policy makers in the health and education sectors by providing them with 'light touch' ethnogr...
In this chapter I focus on the topic of development NGOs and consider three aspects of its relatively weak presence as a theme within management science. First, I explore the traditional ambivalence that many development NGOs have felt towards management and
discuss the reasons for this. Second, I provide a brief overview of the fledgling field of...
Background
Few studies exist of women's experiences and understanding of health in the transition from reproductive to post-reproductive age. Available data is from high-income settings, and most studies tend to focus on women of reproductive age. Little is known about women's perspectives in the Palestinian context. The aim of this study was to ad...
Executive Summary (preliminary – comments welcome, but not to be cited)
Development policy and practice requires a detailed understanding of the ways that power operates at the local level. Drawing on a literature review and on new qualitative data, this study takes a bottom-up view of how ordinary people try to deal with the local power structur...
Following up on research conducted by the authors just over a decade ago, this study of the local power structure
presents new qualitative data to analyse the changing formal and informal institutions that govern people’s lives in
rural and urban Bangladesh. It explores the ways in which disadvantaged individuals and groups seek to increase
their i...
In an ever-globalizing world, opportunities for exchanging ideas across national and regional boundaries that address problems of poverty and inequality are increasing. In particular, much attention is now given within the worlds of international development policy and practice to the importance of promoting the idea of “South-South” cooperation, l...
There is limited evidence about women's experiences of the midlife, beyond a narrow – frequently biomedical – focus on the menopause. The broader (physical, social, cultural, political) dimensions of women's midlife health are poorly understood, particularly in low and middle-income countries. Our study seeks to understand how women in the West Ban...
This paper examines the political role of radical development NGOs that emerged in Bangladesh to challenge the marginalization of subordinate groups and strengthen democratic processes. After briefly introducing the political context of Bangladesh and its NGOs, the paper identifies and defines a radical NGO sub-sector. It then reviews the activitie...
In this essay, I focus on three types of anthropological interaction with NGOs: (1) direct anthropological interest in NGOs as increasingly important social and political actors; (2) the utility of studying NGOs as useful “portals” to other issues; and (3), the methodological issues generated by the ways in which anthropologists become involved wit...
Like many so-called developing countries, Bangladesh has attracted a wide range of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mainly from Western countries, that have worked on disaster relief, welfare and development issues. But what is perhaps unusual has been the scale and infl uence of the country's home-grown or indigenous NGO sector...
The category "NGO" (non-governmental organization) is notoriously hard to fix. Defined in terms of what they are not, the term NGO masks great diversity and assumes an unproblematic boundary. The use of the term persists, in no small part because several different types of actors involved in a range of fields depend on what we call the "productive...
This paper briefly draws together ideas from the work presented by other contributors to this special issue and outlines some additional themes particularly in relation to non-governmental organisations, temporalities and changing frames of ‘development’. A focus on multiple temporalities invites us to explore understandings of how time is and how...
The resilience concept requires greater attention to human livelihoods if it is to address the limits to adaptation strategies and the development needs of the planet’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Although the concept of resilience is increasingly informing research and policy, its transfer from ecological theory to social systems leads to...
The resilience concept requires greater attention to human livelihoods if it is to address the limits to adaptation strategies and the development needs of the planet’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Although the concept of resilience is increasingly informing research and policy, its transfer from ecological theory to social systems leads to...
Partly due to tensions around “applied” work within the discipline, and partly due to a preference for engaging with social movements rather than formal organizations, analytical engagement by anthropologists with NGOs have been have been relatively slow to emerge. Perhaps another factor has been the uncomfortable similarity between the work that a...
The profile of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work in the developing world has increased dramatically over the past two decades. International and local NGOs have moved centre stage within international, national and local efforts to eradicate poverty. NGOs are now seen as an important element of ‘civil society’, a concept that has been...
Since third sector research emerged as a full-fledged interdisciplinary
academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained—in
common with many other social science disciplines—between communities of
researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich
Western countries and those who work on...
Since third sector research emerged as a fully-fledged inter-disciplinary academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained – in common with many other social science disciplines - between communities of researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich Western countries and those who wo...
This paper discusses the recent rise of popular ‘blockbuster’ books written by international
development industry insiders and produced by commercial publishers. The paper explores
a set of common stylistic devices found within this emerging genre. Though each book is
different, a key trope is the story of an author's earlier professional life—the...
Development is one of the dominant organising ideas of our times, and there are many ways to approach it. Academics within development studies tend to approach the study of development from the familiar fields of economics, political science, geography and sociology. Most people - whether development professionals or ordinary members of the public...
The role of intermediary or broker is not one that has always tended to receive
a good press. Brokers may all too often come to be seen as untrustworthy
middlemen (or women) who create unnecessary costly distance between
individuals and the desired transactions they are seeking to complete. Yet
brokers may also serve as connectors, integrating and...
Studying individuals who move from civil society into government in
an effort to pursue reform agendas provides important “bottom up”
insights into the complexity of policy processes. Using a set of original
life history data collected in the Philippines, this article analyses
the experiences of such crossover reformist efforts in post-Marcos
Phili...
Popular representations of development need to be taken seriously (though not uncritically) as sources of authoritative knowledge, not least because this is how most people in the global North (and elsewhere) ‘encounter’ development issues. To this end, and building on the broader agenda presented in a previous paper on exploring the usefulness of...
The Bangladesh Health and Education Reality Check Approach (RCA) commissioned by Sida, is an experimental intitiative. It tries to find out more about what is happening ‘from the ground up’ by interacting directly with ordinary people. Since 2007, the RCA has tried to provide policy makers with a clearer sense of peoples’ experiences and views abou...
Abstract
Purpose – Organizational life and policy making is increasingly conceived in terms of a “three sector”
model – public, private and “third”. The purpose of this research paper is to examine a little-studied
phenomenon that increasingly characterises societies in both the “developed” and the “developing”
worlds. It aims to argue that these “...
Little attention has been given to the boundary-spanning capabilities of human service managers seeking to effectively manage the relationship between public and nonprofit sector programs. This exploratory study begins to identify those capabilities by documenting the boundary-crossing career trajectories of senior human service managers and direct...
Using Bangladesh as its focus, this chapter asks whether we are doing enough to learn from past experiences to ensure that development actors can create coherent and effective responses to the new challenges of climate change. The author suggests that this learning requires less emphasis on new ideas and unhelpful ‘crisis narratives’ of climate cha...
Most social scientists want to feel that their work can make a difference. We are broadly
sympathetic to the increasing efforts by international development agency funders to try
to achieve a tighter fit between the academic research that they commission, and the
worlds of policy and practice. As Batterbury and Horowitz (2011) suggest, the question...
During the 1970s, major policy debates on the role of mechanisation in agricultural and rural development in south Asia took place; by the early 1990s, such debates had largely faded. Yet today, countries such as Bangladesh possess some of the most productive, mechanised and labour-intensive agricultural industries in south Asia. This paper reopens...
Relatively little is known or understood about Bangladesh by outsiders. Since its hard-won independence from Pakistan in 1971, it has been ravaged by economic and environmental disasters. Only recently has the country begun to emerge as a fragile, but functioning, parliamentary democracy, relatively self-sufficient in food production and with an ec...
David Cameron’s Big Society idea is ambitious but its implications are far from straightforward. David Lewis argues that the government’s attempt to reshape relationships between citizens, state, and market may rapidly become a political liability and burden voluntary groups and charities with responsibilities that they may be unable to deliver on.
Since 9/11 ideas of security have focused in part on the development of ungovernable spaces. Important debates are now being had over the nature, impacts, and outcomes of the numerous policy statements made by northern governments, NGOs, and international institutions that view the merging of security with development as both unproblematic and prog...
How does political ideology inform the changing roles and perceptions of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within international development policy? This paper adopts an anthropological approach to this question and argues that the ideas that have shaped the growth of interest among donors in NGOs are rooted in the wider politics of how developm...
Using recently-collected ethnographic life history data, this paper analyses in historical context the shifting boundary between governmental and nongovernmental ‘worlds’ in Bangladesh. First, the paper explores the ways in which this boundary is an ambiguous one, and aims to show how it is constructed and maintained, through an analysis of new typ...
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now recognised as key third sector actors on the landscapes of development, human rights, humanitarian action, environment, and many other areas of public action, from the post-2004 tsunami reconstruction efforts in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, to the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign for aid...
L’histoire de l’Association des Producteurs Artisans (ACP), une organisation de commerce équitable au Népal, illustre un aspect important – mais souvent ignoré – de la recherche sur les organismes de dévelopement : que chaque organisation évolue de manière unique, et ne se prête donc pas nécessairement à des catégorisations standardisées telles que...
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are high profile actors in the field of international development, both as providers of services to vulnerable individuals and communities and as campaigning policy advocates. This book provides a critical introduction to the wide-ranging topic of NGOs and development. Written by two authors with more than twen...
Development agencies tend to focus more strongly on the promised delivery of change in the future than they do on analysing the historical contexts and origins of development ideas and practices. The histories of development ideas and agencies, as well as those of the people who work within them, are therefore important topics for anthropological a...
The life-history method is a valuable tool for social policy research. Taking an anthropological approach to studying policy, the article analyses the usefulness of the method using data drawn from a set of recently collected life-work histories from the UK. These life-work histories document the experiences of individuals who have crossed over bet...
This article discusses a set of qualitative data collected in 2004 on changes in formal and informal aspects of local institutions and power in Bangladesh, drawn from three contrasting villages of Greater Faridpur district. It explores the idea that the rural power structure, previously conceived as relatively rigid ‘net’, is in certain ways becomi...
In Bangladesh, aquaculture is regarded by many development policy-makers and practitioners as an important means for improving food availability and consumption, but there is a growing awareness of constraints to straightforward intensification. Publicly funded extension services do not have sufficient resources to reach geographically dispersed fi...
This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature...
The three-sector model—encompassing the private, public and non-governmental or 'third' sectors—is important to much of the research that is undertaken on development policy. While it may be analytically convenient to separate the three sectors, the realities are more complex. Non-governmental actors and government/public sector agencies are linked...
Since the early 1990s, NGOs have achieved a growing presence on the landscape of international development, with their increased numbers and profile at global, national and local levels. The development industry began to focus on NGOs as newly important actors in development, and with this interest came a set of associated management ideas and prac...
This study of the rural power structure presents new qualitative data to analyse the changing formal and informal institutions which govern people’s lives in one area of rural Bangladesh. The research explores the ways in which disadvantaged individuals and groups seek to increase their influence and further their economic and social goals. It docu...
In this article, Dee Jupp and colleagues describe how the Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) team in Bangladesh is carrying out a 5-year study to track the progress of two Sida-supported programmes in primary healthcare and primary education. Their 'Reality Checks' combine immersions and conventional participatory approache...
Introduction: Questions of accountability have become important and difficult ones in recent years for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in the development field. The rise of development NGOs during the late 1980s generated considerable expectations regarding their performance strengths and political contributions, but this was accompani...
The World Bank's recent concern for 'empowerment' grows out of longer standing discussions of participation, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society. While commitments to empowerment enter World Bank texts with relative ease, their practice within Bank-funded projects is far more contingent, and the meanings they assume become much...
The first edition of this book was published in 2001 by Routledge and was the first academic text on the important new emerging field of NGO management. It sets out the field for researchers with a new and original conceptual framework, contains a comprehensive review of existing literature from a variety of disciplines (including management, devel...
The World Bank's recent concern for 'empowerment' grows out of longer standing discussions of participation, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society. While commitments to empowerment enter World Bank texts with relative ease, their practice within Bank-funded projects is far more contingent, and the meanings they assume become much...
The third sector is variously conceived of an institutional space between state, market and household or as a collection of organisations with particular values and structural characteristics. Against the backdrop of the recent growth of interest in the third sector, this paper begins by exploring the genealogy of the term from diverse work by writ...
This article aims to do three things. First, it briefly sketches out the history of the recent rise to prominence of NGOs as an issue in development studies, linking this with the both the growth of and resistance to neo-liberal policy agendas. Second, it reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of NGO research to date, which although wide-ranging...
This paper sets out an argument for moving forward research on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) within developnment studies. The body of research on NGOs that emerged from the late 1980s onwards focused primarily on NGO roles as development actors and their organisational attributes, but paid less attention to theory and context. While such re...
The success of any international development agency depends on an understanding of the ways in which a community and individuals relate to ideas and resources. David Lewis and David Mosse have brought together a number of anthropologists with practical experience in development to show how ethnography can be an indispensable tool for understanding...
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Projects (4)
To collect relevant scientific understanding, data, models, solutions, and certifications for Covid-19 caused by the SARS-CoV-2. Together we can learn more than when working alone.
The Justice and Security Research Programme (JSRP) is a research consortium led by the Department of International Development (ID) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), developed in partnership with academic and media organisations from the global North and South, and with funding from the UK Department for International Development (DfID).