ABSTRACT
This is a case study about the moral dimensions of institutionalised development optimism. A major characteristic of development interventions is the gradual loss, in the process of going through what is veilingly called ‘the project cycle’, of a sense of proportion, of an acknowledgement of limits to planned intervention in local processes. Excessive notions of and belief in governability and control have become the wax with which policy objectives are glued together like the feathers of Icarus’s wings. In this chapter we intend to problematise the development process as a process which is only partly constituted by local circumstances that more or less determine the options and choices available for intervention. In our view, its dynamic is very strongly influenced by factors of quite a different order, unrelated to the local context of intervention. First, there are the policy objectives that form the normative basis of donor development practice. Second, there is the rather compulsive policy cycle, setting the stage for the various actors, each with their own background to act in an orderly way.
