ABSTRACT
In 2001, Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world (Human Development Index – HDI), and one of the least efficient when it comes to public service provision (according to the Failed States Index), privatized its national water company. The debate in Niger was lively at the time; unions and newspapers claimed that the privatization was a result of conditions imposed by the World Bank and that it constituted a recolonization of Nigerien resources and an infringement on Nigerien sovereignty. Shortly after that, in 2002, I interviewed Nigerien state agents about why the company had been privatized. Many of them responded that, as a poor country, Niger had no choice. This perception raised questions about the possibility of the Nigerien state. How is a state possible that considers itself as lacking autonomy of choice and control over policies and strategies? The how question is not meant as a rhetorical indication of impossibility, but as a question that requires investigation. By saying that the state has no choice, the state agents make sense of themselves as unable to act; yet at the same time, taking the position of having no choice implies a certain room for manoeuvre. For example, having no choice can be used to exempt the Nigerien state from responsibility for the outcome of reform. Hence, state agents’ conceptions of the lack of choice shape how the Nigerien state can be thought and acted. Current attempts as part of development cooperation to achieve recipient
country ownership are addressing this particular problem by means of responsibilization mechanisms. Here responsibilization is understood as a neoliberal governmental logic that on the one hand appeals to the agency of subjects, enabling subjects to make choices for which they can be held responsible, and on the other hand aims to shape those choices through technologies of performance where the anticipated result has already been defined (O’Malley, 1996; Dean, 1999; Hansson, 2013). As such, responsibilization is a way of appealing to recipient state agents to want to reform themselves into becoming agents of choice and control in ways that are considered conducive to development and the efficiency of aid. This has been argued to be a liberal way of governing insofar as it appeals to the desires of
the subject (Abrahamsen, 2004). However, as has been argued in Chapter 1 of this volume, the successful production of responsible subjects in accordance with governing logics cannot be taken for granted. Instead, we often see how something else is produced in particular contexts which disturbs the smooth implementation of liberal reform. Understanding what such reforms come to mean in the particular context
requires closer attention not just to governing structures but to how those structures are engaged with by ‘the governed’, and a study of the complexities and messiness of subjectivation processes on the ground. As is argued in this volume, by using the phrase ‘the agency of being governed’, we want to point at the way the subject is active as it is being inscribed in discourse and practice. In my research I work methodologically with a notion of the agency of being governed by exploring the question of how state agents engage with being governed as responsible subjects. In relation to this, it is important to reflect on the power relations involved
in the relationship between the researcher and the object of research, in this case the Nigerien state agents. This requires attending to how that relationship is shaped, not just by us as individuals but by the institutions by which we, as researchers, and our activities, are validated, among them the Western university and the Nigerien state (see Spivak, this volume). The way power relations play out in research concerns both the possibility of the meeting that the interview situation implies, but also the way in which knowledge is produced in text. In this chapter I discuss some of the methodological challenges of the
approach described above, and how I have dealt with them in my research. My hope is that in making explicit the methodological issues I faced and the choices I made, I may provide food for thought for others grappling with how to study effects of power in general and in development studies in particular. In the first half of the chapter I lay out how I have gone about finding an analytical framework for studying responsibilization. I then continue to give an in-depth example from my analysis of Nigerien state agent narratives in order to make visible and explicit the difficulties of making claims about effects of power. I end by discussing implications of my theoretical perspective, and the power relations involved in the research process, on what the empirical material can be seen to represent. I also interrogate my own responsibility as researcher for not treating the people I study as already known.
