Endangering Development: Politics, Projects, and Environment in Burkina Faso  (Non-Fiction)
By Lars Engberg-Pedersen

Praeger Publishers (February 28, 2003) USD$82.95

The politics of international intervention into rural areas is the subject of this book. Engberg-Pedersen shows how nongovernmental organizations' activities with women's groups, natural resource management projects, decentralization policies, and rural democratization advocates must enter an arena of local struggle for resources and status. He maintains that activists often seriously contradict rural people's practices and understandings of particular issues and how they should be organized. Thus, while societal conflicts and institutional contradictions are inescapable features of rural development, development assistance agents and scholars of democratization and political change in Africa largely ignore them.