Malaria Control and its Discontents:A Critical Examination of the Emerging Discourse of Seriousness in Development Assistance

Abstract

Economic production as well as consumption binds many countries together, directly and indirectly. And for this reason, the way one country or a set of countries develop has regional and global ramifications. The case of the Third World is one in which many countries are trying to develop at the same time, and it presents a real potential for distorting global production and consumption patterns. This potentiality compels developed countries to try and organise the way the development of Third World countries progresses. What it also means is that although financial investments are essential to international development, political power remains its activating ingredient. As such, this dissertation is about how the operation of what may be termed 'development power' is organised, and what the organising principles are. The operation of development power is organised on the basis of assistance; countries trying to develop are not left to their own devices. Assistance is so compellingly available it can be regarded as imposed. Assistance creates a role for developed countries in the affairs of developing countries and this in itself operates as an anchor for instrumental power. The chief organising principle is the maintenance of developing countries as penetrable markets for developed economies. To this end, it is important that the way solutions are provided for identified development problems incorporates material and intellectual production in developed countries. This is a fundamental problematic in international development and it is a problematic that is maintained by power. It is what this dissertation explores.Focusing on malaria control as a site for the analysis of development assistance, the dissertation intervenes in the malaria control debate at a number of levels: it shows that organised responses to the disease have evolved in accordance with the way the interests of relevant power structures have evolved, making colonial responses characteristically different from postcolonial ones. The dissertation also extends the narrative of development as a discourse by exploring the specific ways the discourse of development is operationalized in the case of malaria control in Nigeria. It concludes that this is done through a connected 'discourse of seriousness.' This is a discourse that compels national actors to act in certain amenable ways in order to demonstrate seriousness to their global counterparts. The dissertation explores the internal techniques by which this is achieved.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Rayner (Supervisor) & Steven Pierce (Supervisor)