This article sets out to rethink the usefulness of some aspects of the work of Michel Foucault to the study of development. Drawing on the detailed ethnography of a development consultancy, it focuses on how change was induced in an important and long-standing rural development project in West Africa. Foucauldian approaches provide a valuable conceptual framework for unravelling the regimes of rationality underpinning development institutions and practices. However, they fail to address satisfactorily the relation between discourse and agency within hierarchically stratified contexts. This article attempts to integrate the notion of discourse in an analytical framework specifically aimed at studying dynamics of power and hierarchy in development.
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Benedetta Rossi (2004) studied this question.
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