Whose Dam? The Danger of Narrowly Defined Development: The Case of Kajbar Dam, Northern Sudan
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Abstract
The costs and atrocities of authoritarian development have always been justified by the promised material outcome. There is an English proverb that says, “You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.” In some contexts, this saying can dangerously misinform the development intervention, because it perceives the cost of making an omelet (i.e. the achievement of anticipated goals) can be paid only by breaking the egg (the narrowly calculated costs of development). It takes for granted that there is a well-founded and strongly built kitchen (with the kitchen I refer to the state in this article) in which to make the omelette. The main question I raise is: what if the kitchen is so poorly constructed that it collapses the moment we break the egg? In other words what if the omelette making has hidden, unrecognized and downplayed costs that go well beyond breaking eggs to include the potential collapse of the kitchen. My contention is that the state in most of development literatures is assumed to be a legitimate agent of undertaking development but in fact is rarely analyzed and contextualized. Contrary to these widely held beliefs, the case of Kajbar Dam proves that when the promotion of citizenship through enthusiastic participation is compromised in favor of developmentalists’ dogma in economic growth, neither is achieved.
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