Chapter 1. Traveling Models and the Test of Contexts
Chapter 2. An Exploratory Concept: Practical Norms
Chapter 3. Case Study: Practical Norms in a Public Service (Niger)
Chapter 4. Behind Practical Norms: The Plurality of Social Logics
Chapter 5. The Delivery of Goods of General Interest: Modes of Governance and Delivery Configurations
Chapter 6. The Bureaucratic-Statist Mode of Governance
Chapter 7. Towards Reform from Within

Conclusion: The Perspective of Discordance, an Anthropology of Dissonances, Gaps, Contradictions and Diversities

References
Index

Traveling Models and Practical Norms

The Misadventures of Social Engineering in Africa and Beyond

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

336 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-852-3 Hb Published (February 2025)

eISBN 978-1-80539-853-0 eBook

Details

“This is a very worthwhile book … it brings together a new and very coherent argument around development. The sheer scale of Olivier de Sardan’s ground-level immersion in the issues over five decades lends the book an incomparable rigor and depth.” • David Lewis, London School of Economics

“This is a valuable book by a leading anthropologist of development, statecraft, and bureaucracy in West Africa. It is clearly something of a culmination of a distinguished career, filled with insights gleaned from decades of work.” • Kevin Donovan, The University of Edinburgh

Public policies, development projects, and NGO interventions often have large gaps between the planning and execution. Standardized public policies, especially development ones, ignore the multiple contexts in which they are implemented. Local actors (those targeted by public policies or responsible for implementing them) play a major role in the implementation of planning and execution. Their many strategies for circumventing official directives and protocols follow implicit "practical norms" that are ignored by international experts. This book examines how different modes of governance that deliver services of general interest experience significant gaps between explicit rules and implicit practices, between planned actions and daily routines, in Africa and beyond.

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan is among the founders of LASDEL, Laboratory for Study and Research on Social Dynamics and Local Development, in Niamey. He is also Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His latest publications include "Cash Transfers in Context. An anthropological perspective", (ed. with E.Piccoli), Berghahn 2018.