Empowering NGOs: The Microcredit Movement through Foucault's Notion of Dispositif

This article develops a critical response to initiatives such as microcredit. The critical tools for understanding the shifts in the development project need to be extended beyond those approaches that center on economic relations. To begin to address this need, I develop one aspect of postdevelopment literature by drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of dispositif - a task that requires some adjustments to the ways in which this concept has been used so far. The dispositif is particularly useful for engaging with the fluidity and heterogeneity of the development project and for consideration of relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity alongside the economic. To address the question of the rise of NGOs and associated notions of autonomy and empowerment specifically, I make use of Foucault's concept of governmentality. Considering recent shifts in the development project through this lens highlights ways in which phenomena such as the rise of NGOs are not necessarily emancipatory. To the contrary, it suggests a basis for the emergence of initiatives and practices that increase the penetration of power into the social body of the Third World through the development dispositif. To demonstrate these issues and my approach I examine the Grameen Bank and microcredit movement, arguing that it is through 'empowerment' that the developmentalist subjective modality is promoted in an operation of developmentalist discipline.