ABSTRACT
This article looks at the methodological implications of bringing what has been termed an ‘ethnographic perspective’ ( Street, 2001a ) on literacies, identities and social change, into the international policy discourse on education and development. Last year, I was part of a group commissioned to write a set of background papers on the ‘benefits of literacy’ for the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report (GMR) on Education for All 2006, Literacy for Life (UNESCO, 2005). 2 This experience gave us — as a group of ethnographic researchers — the opportunity to reflect on how and whether ethnographic insights can be translated into a policy context. In writing this paper, I am aware that these debates are not new. Since the 1980s when anthropologists began to be employed by development agencies as ‘problem solvers’ (Mosse 1998: 14), there has been critical examination of the contribution of ethnographers to project appraisal (Pottier, 1993) and monitoring of impact (Mosse et al., 1998), as well as questions around their role as development actors within or outside (as consultants) aid institutions (Gardner and Lewis, 1996; Grillo and Stirrat, 1997). With the move away from project-based approaches to development, it has sometimes remained easier for anthropologists to work outside or to critique policy discourses than to focus on the challenge of integrating ethnographic approaches within development policy. Through analysing a recent policy document, this article explores ways in which ethnographic literacy researchers could engage more directly with policy discourse. My paper builds on insights from the 1990s literature cited above concerning the role of anthropologists in development but my focus differs from those analyses of anthropologists working within the bounded context of a project. I also draw on my own experiences of conducting ethnographic research on adult literacy in Nepal.
